Gradient-free and gradient-based methods for shape optimization of water turbine blade
The purpose of our work is to develop an automatic shape optimization tool for runner wheel blades in reaction water turbines, especially in Kaplan turbines. The fluid flow is simulated using an in-house incompressible turbulent flow solver based on recently introduced isogeometric analysis (see e.g. J. A. Cotrell et al.: Isogeometric Analysis: Toward Integration of CAD and FEA, Wiley, 2009). The proposed automatic shape optimization approach is based on a so-called hybrid optimization which combines...