FSI & Shape Optimization

Project - 3 : Adjoint shape optimization of internal and external flow geometries in OpenFOAM

This project was undertaken as part of an internship with Udvavisk Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, along with the project on Natural Gas combustion. As part of this work, an OpenFOAM-based solver adjointSensitivityFoam solver was first used to optimize the shape of a car for minimum noise and a reduction of 35% in wind noise was obtained. Further, this solver was extended to perform flow topology optimization in internal flows by implementing the effects of volumetric sensitivities. Using this new solver, reduction of 38% wind noise in the case of flow inside a backward-facing step geometry was obtained. Moreover, the default OpenFOAM solver adjointShapeOptimizationFoam was corrected for sign in the gradient descent algorithm and new objective function to minimize power dissipation in the flow, was implemented. Using this, upto 52% reduction in power dissipation was obtained for flow inside a T-section geometry.

This work was presented at the 44th National Conference on Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Power 2017 (December 2017). Here's a link to the submitted paper (not published online) - FMFP_submission

Project - 4 : Flapping Wing Aerodynamics

This project was carried out as part of a Summer Internship with Dr. Sunetra Sarkar, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras between May-July 2015. As part of this project, pure pitching, pure plunging and combined pitching-plunging validation cases were carried out based on published research works using ANSYS Fluent platform. Further, for combined pitching-plunging case, the phase difference between pitching and plunging motions were optimized for enhanced thrust.

A report on this work can be found here. Access shall be granted upon request. A few results have been shown below -

An example of a deflected wake pattern (thrust-producing wake) in pure plunging case

  Vorticity contours in the optimal case (pitching leading plunging by pi/2 radians)