General Design Objectives

The objective of a conjugate heat transfer design and optimization program should be to provide industry w ith a modular, reliable and proven design optimization tool that will take into account the interaction of 3-D extenor hot gas aerodynamics, heal convection at the hot extenor surface, heat conduction throughout the structure material, and heat convection on the w alls of the inte­rior coolant passages. Most of these concepts have already been individually developed, proven and published by the author and other researchers, thus providing strong assurance (hat the over­all integration can be successfully accomplished.

The entire program should be conveniently broken into individual self-sustaining mod­ular tasks To remain within the desired time frame and budget, the designers should try to uti­lize as much as possible the existing analysis, inverse design and constrained optimization computer codes. They should also try to implement methods for the acceleration of iterative algorithms in arbitrary systems of partial differential equations on highly clustered grids (266). To make the enure design optimization software package as flexible as possible and responsive to the user’s needs, it should be implemented on a cluster of disparate microcomputers, worksta­tions. a vector multiprocessor, and a massively parallel processor.

Such a design tool should feature the combination of fully 3-D (not 2-D or quasi 3-D) aero and thermal capabilities dedicated to address user specified design objectives and improve­ments. and should provide:

• optimization of surface heat fluxes and temperatures for minimum coolant flow rate,

• minimization of the number of coolant flow passages.

• optimization of thicknesses of walls and interior struts, and

• determination of convective heat transfer coefficients on surfaces of 3-D coolant passages.

These design objectives could be accomplished using a number of conceptually differ­ent approaches. One specific set of scenarios that has been developed by the author can be sum­marized as follows.