Prometheus: a Geometry-centric Optimization System for Combustor Design

The following paper presents an overview of the Prometheus design system and its applications to gas turbine combustor design. Unlike a traditional “optimizer-centric” method, Prometheus aims to reduce both the level of workflow complexity and rework by taking a more “geometry-centric” approach to design optimization by shifting the control of script generation away from the optimization program to the computer aided design (CAD) package. Prometheus therefore enables significant geometry changes to be automatically reflected in all subsequent scripts necessary for the analysis of a combustor. Prometheus’ current capabilities include automatic fluid volume generation and aero-thermal and thermo-acoustic network generation as well as automatic mesh and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) script generation.