Leaveraging the continuous adjoint method for industrial scale application

One of the fastest growing fields in CFD research is adjoint optimization. Adjoint methods are widely used by people in industry to optimize their products. Drag force minimization of a car, lift force maximization of aeroplanes and minimization of power losses in ducts are some of these optimization problems.
The adjoint method provides the sensitivity derivatives of the objective function (drag force etc.) with respect to the design variables (nodal displacement towards the normal direction of the surface). The calculation of the sensitivity derivatives is independent from the number of the design variables which gives the adjoint method a major advantage comparing with the other methods, especially in the problems with large design spaces.