A General Purpose Discrete Adjoint Formulation for Inviscid Two-Dimensional Fluid Dynamic Optimization

A general purpose discrete adjoint formulation for robust and ecient design optimization of nozzles in inviscid ow conditions, with dierent ow solvers, is presented and tested on various nozzle problems. An approximate, dissipative ow solver is used to develop the discrete quasi-time-dependent adjoint equations. The resulting design sensitivities are very robust even in the presence of noise or other non-smoothness associated with objective functions in many high-speed ow problems. The optimization is performed using a sequence of progressively ner grids for the solution of the ow eld, together with a progressive