Automatic Design Optimisation of a Transonic Compressor Rotor for Improving Aeroacoustic and Aerodynamic Performance

Multidisciplinary design optimisation of transonic rotors, especially focusing on improving the aeroacoustic performance, has received little attention. This paper employs an automatic design optimisation approach to reduce the shock-associated tone noise and to increase the adiabatic efficiency of NASA rotor 37. An evolutionary algorithm for multi-objective trade-offs searching is used to obtain the noise-efficiency Pareto front. High-fidelity numerical simulations are directly applied in the optimisation loop for aeroacoustic and aerodynamic analysis. Significant noise reduction and efficiency increase have been achieved. Two optimised designs corresponding to the endpoints of the Pareto front have been analysed comprehensively from the perspectives of rotor characteristics, noise performance, and flow and acoustic fields, to understand the mechanisms responsible for the performance improvements.