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Abstract The exhaust volute, an important component of a centrifugal compressor, plays a crucial role in improving overall compressor efficiency. Traditional design methods rely heavily on designer’s experience and often result in low design efficiency. In this study, a topology optimization design method for the exhaust volute flow channel is proposed to address this issue. The optimization objective focuses on minimizing flow energy dissipation within the design domain while considering flow compressibility. The sensitivity of the objective function to design variables is calculated using the discrete adjoint method. In the open-source platform OpenFOAM, the finite volume method is utilized to solve governing equations with darcy source term and adjoint equations, and the Method of Moving Asymptotes (MMA) algorithm is applied to solve the optimization problem. Numerical examples of different volute types in two and three dimensionals are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the topology optimization method proposed in the present work can quickly obtain the optimal volute configuration.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.