HYDRODYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL MULTI-ELEMENT TRAWL-DOOR SHAPES USING LOCAL SURROGATE MODELS AND ANALYSIS OF CONTROLLABLE TRAWL-DOOR SHAPES

Abstract: The study is motivated by the quest to lower the fuel consumption of trawlers and reduce green house gas emissions. Conventional trawl-doors contribute to about one third of the trawlers fuel consumption. Design and optimization of trawl-doors using computational models is vital in minimizing the fuel consumption.The main objective of this work is to develope an optimization algorithm for the shape design of trawl-doors using computational uid dynamic (CFD) models. High-fidelity CFD models are computationally expensive and therefore, conventional optimization methods, which often require large number of evaluations are not feasible. The proposed method is iterative and uses local second order response surface approximation models of the high-fidelity CFD model, constructed in each iteration. The RSA are constructed locally and are regenerated at each iteration in new domain. We use a trust region mechanism to move the center of the search domain and to increase or decrease the size ofthe search domain. This reduces the number of evaluations. We propose novel shaped trawl-door shapes and investigate their performance. These shapes are similar to multi-element airfoils on aircraft i.e., airfoil shapes with slats and flaps. We apply the proposed optimization algorithm to the novel-shaped design of two-dimensional multi-element trawl-door shapes with several design variables controlling the slat and flap positions and alignment. The objective is to increase the hydrodynamic efficiency for a given lift constraint. The results are then compared to the performance of a typical trawl-door shape. The results indicate that a satisfactory design can be obtained at the cost of few iterations of the algorithm. We also investigate controllable trawl-doors where the flap angle can be varied, depending on the operational condition.