Turbomachinery Simulation

Rotating machines are extensively used in many industries such as Aerospace, Automotive, Datacenters Cooling, IT-Hardware, Medical devices, Energy, Oil and Gas, HVAC. Most common rotating machines are fans, pumps, compressors, and turbines.

The biggest challenges for delivering the future rotating machines are improving performance and reliability in addition to decreasing the cost. Aeroacoustics and NVH is becoming more and more important as the cars and devices are getting quieter and quieter. Improving efficiency and performance while decreasing noise and vibration could be predicted using high fidelity simulation methods. Ansys as a simulation lead in the market has very accurate workflows for modeling rotating machines. The initial design could be done in legacy tools such as Vista and BladeGen from which a high-quality 3D CAD may be exported to flagship meshing tool and solvers. TurboGrid is a custom-built mashing tool for turbomachines that can generate a high-quality grid in several simple steps in a very short time. CFX is the recommended tool in Ansys portfolio for rotating machines as it has a turbo mode that can make setting up the model much more convenient. Postprocessing is quite easy and powerful in CFD-Post using the turbo tab.

CFturbo is a new tool that can be added as an extension and could replace Vista and BladeGen for the conceptual/initial design stage. It makes it very convenient and easy for engineers to tweak the geometry of the turbomachine. CFturbo is totally compatible with Ansys Workbench and allows the parametrization of geometry and can export to meshing engines which makes it a perfect tool for optimization. Engineers can refine designs easily before physical tests are performed, accelerating the process while reducing risk and cost.

Simulating turbomachinery applications is usually time-consuming due to its complicated nature. Only Ansys, with its powerful portfolio and its custom-built convenient turbomachinery workflow, is up to the challenge. More and more companies have used Ansys successfully for various rotating machine applications.