Application of the adjoint method to the propeller designs

In this paper, a propeller design method based on the adjoint method is presented. For the optimization problems, the gradient methods are usually suffering from the inefficient computations of the gradients, and the adjoint method can remedy this problem. In this paper, the adjoint equation of the boundary element method is first derived, and it is then applied to the propeller design problems. The Lagrange-multiplier method with the adjoint equations for solving the gradients is used in this method. Two design examples are demonstrated in the paper, and both examples show that the presented method can successfully achieve the design goals.