D’Ambros, AlessioKipouros, TimoleonZachos, PavlosSavill, MarkBenini, Ernesto2018-10-172018-10-172018-10-12Alessio D’Ambros,Timoleon Kipouros, Pavlos Zachos et al., Computational design optimization for S-ducts. Designs, 2018, Volume 2, Issue 4, Article number 362411-9660https://doi.org/10.3390/designs2040036https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/13540In this work, we investigate the computational design of a typical S-Duct that is found in the literature. We model the design problem as a shape optimization study. The design parameters describe the 3D geometrical changes to the shape of the S-Duct and we assess the improvements to the aerodynamic behavior by considering two objective functions: the pressure losses and the swirl. The geometry management is controlled with the Free-Form Deformation (FFD) technique, the analysis of the flow is performed using steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and the exploration of the design space is achieved using the heuristic optimization algorithm Tabu Search (MOTS). The results reveal potential improvements by 14% with respect to the pressure losses and by 71% with respect to the swirl of the flow. These findings exceed by a large margin the optimality level that was achieved by other approaches in the literature. Further investigation of a range of optimum geometries is performed and reported with a detailed discussion.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/S-duct designcomputational designstochastic optimizationtabu searchfree-form deformationArticle