Design of axial turbines, especially LP turbines, poses difficult trade-offs between requirements of aerodynamic design and structural limitations. In this paper, a methodology is proposed for 3D multi-objective design of axial turbine blades in which a 3D inverse design method is coupled with a multi-objective genetic algorithm.
The effectiveness of this method was proved with the test case in this paper, where a highly stressed LP turbine blade was optimized with a 9hr automatic optimization, improving structural performance considerably while maintaining consistent efficiency characteristic and a 0.5% increase in peak stage efficiency.