Performance Improvement in Meanline Design of Axial Fans and Pumps Stages

The version 6.7 update to TURBOdesign Suite provides significant new features and functionality to enable designers to improve efficiency, achieve higher performance and deliver faster designs to achieve and maintain market-leading products.

The major new functionality included in TURBOdesign Suite v6.7 includes new modules in TURBOdesign Pre for the meanline design of axial fans and pumps stages and predicting the performance map of radial inflow turbines has been added. The prediction module makes use of the newly developed loss models.

What’s new?

Axial fan module

A new module for axial fan design has been added to TURBOdesign Pre, it allows design of:

• Single impeller axial fan
• Axial fan impeller with guide vanes
• Axial fan impeller with contra-rotating impeller
• Axial fan impeller with guide vanes and contra-rotating impeller

Examples are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. TURBOdesign Pre will generate the TURBOdesign1 input files for 3D blade geometry generation.

Figure 1: Axial fan module for the design of an axial fan impeller with contra-rotating impeller.

Figure 2: Meridional geometry of an axial fan impeller with contra-rotating impeller.

Axial pump module

A new module for axial pump design has been added to TURBOdesign Pre, it allows design of:

• Single impeller
• Axial pump impeller with diffuser

An example is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: (a) Axial pump module for single impeller, (b) The 3D blade geometry created by TURBOdesign1 based on the design generated by TURBOdesign Pre.

Improved loss module in radial inflow turbine

New improved loss models for radial inflow turbine design have been developed to replace the original ones.

Performance map prediction for radial inflow turbine

A new functionality for predicting the performance map of radial inflow turbines has been added to TURBOdesign Pre. The prediction module makes use of the newly developed loss models. Once the initial 1D design of the radial inflow turbine is completed, with TURBOdesign Pre, the performance map can be estimated for the curves of mass flow rate and efficiency against:

• Total-to-static pressure expansion ratio
• Rotational speed
• Velocity ratio

The performance map can be generated for both ideal and real gas.

The examples are displayed in Figure 4 and Figure 5. Figure 6 shows consistency between the CFD results and the estimation computed by TURBOdesign Pre.

Figure 4: Radial inflow turbine performance map: mass flow rate and efficiency to T-S expansion ratio.

Figure 5: Radial inflow performance map: mass flow rate and efficiency to rotational speed.

(a) (b) 

Figure 6: Comparison between the solution from CFD (dash lines) and the estimation from TURBOdesign Pre (solid lines). (a) Mass flow rate to T-S expansion ratio; (b) Efficiency ratio to T-S expansion ratio.

 Other major new functionality included in TURBOdesign Suite v6.7 includes:

• Script version of TURBOdesign Pre for automated exploration of the design space in generating the meanline design to cover multiple operating points.
• A new blade geometry construction system that allows for high definition and more robust modelling of all blades.

• Learn the new features and functionalities in TURBOdesign Suite v6.7 to fasten the turbomachinery design and optimization process while achieving higher performances.
• Discover how a combination of fast meanline design and analysis along with robust 3D blade geometry modelling can streamline your turbomachinery development process.
• See how TURBOdesign Suite can seamlessly integrate with different CAE environments - Geometries exported with the new export procedure implemented in TURBOdesign1 are available to TURBOdesign Link for both ANSYS Workbench and STAR-CCM+.
• LIVE demo on the design of a turbocharger centrifugal compressor stage.