Optimisation of Combustor Wall Heat Transfer and Pollutant Emissions for Preliminary Design Using Evolutionary Techniques

This paper presents the concept and application of a design optimisation toolbox, based upon evolutionary techniques, for the preliminary design of a gas turbine combustor. The toolbox has been designed to interface with existing analysis packages and to perform optimisation in parallel over a heterogeneous network of workstations. The optimisation capabilities of the toolbox are demonstrated for gas turbine combustor design by automatically attaining twenty-two performance targets in a combustor design whilst performing minimisation of wall cooling flow and NOx emissions.