Integrated Design of an Active Flow Control System Using a Time-Dependent Adjoint Method

An exploratory study is performed to investigate the use of a time-dependent discrete
adjoint methodology for design optimization of a high-lift wing configuration augmented
with an active flow control system. The location and blowing parameters associated with
a series of jet actuation orifices are used as design variables. In addition, a geometric
parameterization scheme is developed to provide a compact set of design variables
describing the wing shape. The scaling of the implementation is studied using several
thousand processors and it is found that asynchronous file operations can greatly improve
the overall performance of the approach in such massively parallel environments. Three
design examples are presented which seek to maximize the mean value of the lift
coefficient for the coupled system, and results demonstrate improvements as high as 27%
over the baseline value.