Founded in Denmark in 1945, Grundfos now has an annual turnover of £2.6 billion and has an annual production of more than 16 million pump units, making Grundfos one of the world’s leading pump manufacturers. Circulator
pumps for heating and air-conditioning as well as other centrifugal pumps for the industry, water supply, sewage and dosing are the main products. Today Grundfos is the world’s largest manufacturer of circulators, covering
approximately 50% of the world market of these pumps.
Grundfos has been a pioneer in utilizing computer aided engineering (CAE) in their design, development and manufacturing process for pumps and motors. They have been using CAD since 1980 and first introduced CFD in 1992. In the past 10 years a new integrated CAE and design system based on using ANSYS/CFX for structural and fluid flow analysis and TURBOdesign1 for hydrodynamic design has been used in Grundfos.
Grundfos selected TURBOdesign1 as the hydraulic design system of choice because application of TURBOdesign1 resulted in significant improvement in efficiency and suction performance of various pump applications. Another important advantage was the possibilities that TURBOdesign1 and the inverse design based approach provided for rapid and accurate 3D automatic optimization.
The result of the application of this approach has led to substantial improvement in product performance with reduced design cost and lead time. There is significant increase in efficiency across the flow range and peak efficiency improves by 4% point.
In this case study two cases are presented, one related to the redesign of the guidevane for multistage pump and the other related to the application of multipoint optimization.