Shockless design and analysis of transonic blade shapes

A fast computer program was developed to eliminate the shocks by slightly altering portions of the contour of a given airfoil in the cascade. The program can be used in two basic modes: (1) An analysis for steady, transonic, potential flow through a given planar cascade of airfoils and (2) a design for converting a given cascade into a shockless transonic cascade. The design mode can automatically be followed by the analysis mode, which confirms that the flow field is shock free. The program generates its own multilevel boundary conforming computational grids and solves a full potential equation in a fully conservative form. The shockless design is performed by implementing Sobieczky's fictitious-gas elliptic continuation concept.