Ruben Sanchez, Rafael Palacios
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2017-149
This paper introduces a new method to calculate design sensitivities in high-fidelity fluid-structural interactions problems. As the intended application is on aeroelastic systems, characterized by many design variables and a small number of objective functions, gradients are computed from the fully-coupled adjoint equation. This is cast here as an iterated sequence for which convergence is guaranteed. The system is finally obtained using algorithm differentiation on the fully-coupled primal problem and its solution is then sought using a block Gauss-Seidel method, which preserves the partitioned structure of the primal coupled solver. This solution architecture has been implemented in the open-source SU2 software suite for the solution of industrial-scale aeroelastic optimization problems with viscous fluids and structures with nonlinear geometric and material response.