Welcome to the MADDOG Project Website

CSM (grey) and CFD (blue) grid of a gasturbine blade with internal cooling channels (red)

MADDOG is a Marie Skľodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship project funded by the European Commission running from September 2015 to August 2017 under grant agreement number 660759.

The aim of the project is to advance the state of the art adjoint optimisation of gasturbine components, considering not only aerodynamics, but including other disciplines such as structural mechanics, vibration dynamics and conjugate heat transfer concurrently. The aim is to progress toward optimisation of complete systems.

The design of gas turbine components is a multidisciplinary task, involving e.g. aerodynamics, structural mechanics and vibration, aeroacoustics, heat transfer, and many more. Obtaining the right answer to all disciplines is a painstaking task requiring a large number of iterations between different designs and even different design teams. Nowadays, engineers rely more and more on optimisation algorithms to allow for improved designs with minimal user intervention. Gradient based adjoint methods, which can compute sensitivities of design variables very efficiently, are a class of optimisation methods that gain steadily popularity. However, these methods have so far not been extended beyond aerodynamic considerations for gas turbine components, for which essential interactions between different disciplines exist. The main goal of this project is to break this barrier and make the methods also work in a multidisciplinary environment, hence removing one of the major restrictions on their use in gasturbine design.