BladeGen Software User Interface

Hello, welcome to another presentation from Ozen Engineering in the exciting life of design and analysis using ANSYS tools. My name is Mert Berkman and today I'd like to talk about a tool, a design tool called BladeGen for various purposes of blades and impellers it can be applied to.

In this particular case, we're going to look at a radial turbine blade design. So, we have a current mean line design, and we come up with this design by entering some operating conditions and constraints on the geometry. With that, we want to now go to a more detailed design in three dimensions.

The tool we want to use is called BladeGen, available from ANSYS. We now have a BladeGen session, and once you open it, you'll notice four different windows. The top right window is probably the main window, where you can quickly change what you're seeing.

You may want to keep the other three fixed and look at different things using the top left window. The BladeGen tool is particularly designed for turbo machinery designers and is a very hands-on tool.

It's very interactive, and you can essentially control the design by clicking on the pattern, a line segment, or a point. You can then change the profile of your hub region or shroud region. This is in the meridional view, the top, top left side.

You can also impact the design by pulling on the points and curves in these bottom two figures. In our main window, you'll see a cross-section, a blade-to-blade view of our design.

We can quickly switch to a meridional view, look at information on the blades, look at meridional curvature graphs, meridional fraction curvature, theta and beta angles, and see different properties of the geometry of the impeller.

In the top toolbar or ribbon, under Edit, you can control how you want to move the points. Under Model, under Properties, you can essentially give some nomenclature on who designed it, give some background information on the design, work in the angle-thickness mode or the pressure-suction side mode.

You have control over the angle definitions, change the number of blades, and control the blade count. In the blade-to-blade view, we can add a splitter.

When you're adding a blade or a splitter, there's the blade property dialogue, where you have detailed control of your leading edge, trailing edge shapes, cutoffs, hub-shroud ends, etc. We can have a flank mill blade if we click on properties. It will bring up the menu I just mentioned.

Here are some more details about the distribution type, which you can change. Let's go to Layers. Right now, we'll add a hub, which means span 0. If we go to 25% span, you'll notice the blade is thicker than the other hub-shroud.

I'm going to add a little bit of shroud and then add a little bit of shroud. Now you can see the hub-shroud is thinner, and the shroud is thinner. If we add a little bit of shroud at the hub, it's getting thinner towards the shroud. Now you can notice how it looks.

You're not seeing the shroud anymore. For that region, where the shroud is thinner. We can pull and drag for our experience on how to design. We can click on the shroud line and maybe kind of make it move it inward.

As you can see, the inside segments are automatically adjusting on the fly, and the blade shape is changing as well. The region here denotes where our impeller or our blade is. This is our inlet side, and this is our outlet side.

Behind the blade, we can click on a point and maybe change our shroud line and give it a fancy shape if needed. We can move the leading edge and the trailing edge of our blade this way and see the whole impact on what happens at these particular points. You can see the difference between the two.

Let's see another way of changing, for example, if we wanted to play with the blade thickness. We can pick the curvature here. Now we have this smooth, nice thickness, but for some reason, I want to change it. What you can see is the change in the blade shape.

We can go to 50 span, where we can change the thickness. We can play with the angles here, and you'll see a definite strong change in the angles. We can make it thinner and thinner by playing with the thickness. Let's make it back a little thicker. You can see the impact there.

And the blade angle, again, is controlled by the left side curvature. You can see the immediate impact. In this view, you can do a 3D view as well. You can look at your blade in three dimensions.

Using the options down at the bottom, we can look at multiple sections or the whole 360 design by clicking these buttons down there. Or we can look at a shaded version rather than a mesh-like version. Or we can align along X, Y, and Z axes quickly using the view buttons down there.

From output layer control, you can essentially control where you can change the angle for curves, thicknesses, or what is output to the mesh generation tool. So what we see is information passed on at every span that is defined here. Thank you so much. Have a good day.