The design of competitive and efficient industrial equipment is a challenging problem. Design of competitive, efficient, safe and reliable turbomachines and rotating equipment on-time and on-budget is truly a great challenge. High-fidelity simulation and analysis software tools, e.g. computational fluid dynamics or computational structural dynamics became the essential ingredients to reduce design lead time and cost. The next step to further reduce time and cost while improving product technical specs is to use design space exploration software tools. Design space exploration encompasses a family of applications and methods that include design of experiments (DOE), multidisciplinary optimization (MDO), multi-objective (Pareto) optimization, stochastic (robustness and reliability) optimization, and the rich family of structural optimization methods – shape, size, topology, topometry, topography and more. Supported by capabilities for multi-tool integration and simulation process automation, design space exploration is rooted in the domain originally termed “process integration and design optimization,” or PIDO.
pSeven offers turbomachinery designers and simulation engineers a powerful environment to automate their design process by integrating their CAD and CAE tools and to perform design space exploration studies. They can easily integrate such widely used in the industry tools as:
- ConceptNREC
- AxSTREAM
- CFTurbo
- Ansys TurboGrid
- Ansys CFX
- Ansys Fluent
- Ansys Mechanical
- Ansys Workbench
- Numeca AutoGrid
- Numeca FINE™/TURBO
- PumpLinx
- Star-CCM+
- FloEFD
- LS_Dyna
- proprietary 0D/1D/2D and even 3D in-house tools
In addition, design space exploration capabilities of pSeven allow increasing the efficiency of turbomachinery products with the possibility to optimize the geometry and thereby improve the characteristics of the components.
Types of problems that can be solved using pSeven
Below are some types of real-world monodisciplinary (CFD, mechanics, etc.) and multidisciplinary, e.g. coupled aero-thermo-mechanical, multi-objective design optimization problems that can be solved using pSeven to maximize the efficiency, minimize the mass or improve other characteristics of turbomachinery components.
Gasdynamics
- Aerodynamic blade shape optimization of Rotor compressor
- Aerodynamic shape optimization of the last stage of steam turbine
- Multidisciplinary Fan Optimization
- Multistage aerodynamic gas path optimization
- Robust optimization of coupled High and Low Pressure turbines
- Oil pump volute optimization
Mechanics
- Optimal design of:
- high pressure turbine disk
- low pressure turbine disk
- high pressure turbine disk taking into account non-stationary operating mode
- interlocking connection
- bolted joints (high pressures compressor rotor and low pressure turbine)
- uncooled HPT blades taking into account the detuning from resonance modes
- Optimization of compensation of shear forces to prevent axes misalignment between pump and electric motor
Application examples and results
pSeven enables an efficient and fast search for a compromise between the sometimes conflicting demands of high efficiency and respect of mechanical constraints. It helps engineers to get shorter design workflow, lower development costs and product performance upgrade in development of open, such as propellers, windmills and enshrouded fans, and closed rotating machines, like steam/water turbines and jet engines.
Some applications of pSeven in the previous turbomachinery projects include: steam turbines, fans and air compressors, marine propellers, wind turbines, pumps and more. The table below depicts featured application examples with the corresponding results.
| Surrogate Modeling of a High-Pressure Compressor |
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| High pressure turbine (HPT) disc multi-objective optimization |
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| Low Pressure Steam Turbine Blade Shape Optimization |
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| Steam turbine gas path optimization |
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| Optimization of Air Compressor |
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| Automated Integration of SolidWorks and PumpLinx |
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| Optimization of the Marine Propeller Shape in a Uniform Flow |
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