Without any doubt, the blades are the central component of any turbomachine. They transfer energy between a rotating shaft and a fluid, and depending on whether the turbomachine in question is a turbine, a compressor, a pump, a fan, or a propeller, they either extract energy from or impart energy to a continuously moving stream of fluid. Depending on the application, blade designs come in a large variety of shapes, which are typically defined by their cross-section and how it changes in spanwise direction. These properties largely determine the turbomachinery’s performance and can encompass rather large design spaces, which can only reasonably be inspected with automated workflows.
CAESES’ Blade Design Capabilities
CAESES® is a dedicated CAD and automation environment for exploring and optimizing complex and performance-critical geometries (see also this overview on turbomachinery applications). In particular, it brings along several key capabilities for designing state-of-the-art turbomachinery blade geometries:
Complete parametric blade modeling capabilities for radial, axial, and mixed flow rotors and stators.
Angle and shape preserving transformations for axial machine airfoil modeling.
Flexible control of blade, wrap angle and thickness distributions for radial impellers.
High level of customization, i.e., no black box models and full freedom to set up user-defined workflows.
Control of the blade shape via discrete parametric cross sections, continuous control via radial parameter distribution functions, or customized modeling approaches, e.g., for radially fibered or flank milled blades.
High robustness and flexibility of parametric models for automated design studies and optimization.
Comprehensive tuning possibilities of shape details like root fillets, scalloping, leading edges, and blade tips.
Consideration of manufacturing constraints (e.g., flank milling, casting, additive manufacturing).
This is a demo of a fully-parametric centrifugal pump impeller. The final geometry can be downloaded as a STEP file that includes a flow domain or a solid domain. Also, you can download the CAESES project file.
Centrifugal pumps are commonly used in industrial and residential applications due to their relatively simple design, manufacturing, and ease-of-maintenance. A centrifugal water pump was designed making full use the capabilities of CAESES in the scope of an internship project.
Ansys CFD tools like Fluent or CFX are a popular choice for engineers when it comes to evaluating the fluid-dynamic behavior of their designs. When used in an automated design process, they require a suitable CAD tool that can reliably produce the different geometry variants to be analyzed. In our experience, a crucial bottleneck that we set out to solve with CAESES.
Turbine blade optimization including scallops for a turbocharger from the R&D project GAMMA, we developed a robust and variable geometry for a turbocharger turbine wheel, together with our customer MTU and the University Darmstadt (GLR). Aim of the project GAMMA…
The present work explores novel sCO2 axial turbine designs for waste heat recovery (WHR) applications based on a 10 MW case study. A Kulfan Class Shape Transformation (CST) for 2D axial blade profile design is employed, and considerations are undertaken for aerodynamic efficiency and mechanical stresses.
In May 2015, we’ve started an exciting customization project together with SIEMENS, in the context of large gas turbines. Meanwhile, CAESES® has become a design tool at SIEMENS for the parametric design and optimization of turbine blades and endwall contouring…
The blade design capabilities of CAESES® have been completely reviewed with version 4.0, and a lot of great features have been added for the design and optimization of rotating machinery (pumps, turbochargers, turbines etc.). CAESES® is able to create any…
With CAESES® 4.0, there is a lot of new and cool stuff for turbomachinery blade design. This post will give you a brief introduction into the fully-parametric design of an impeller blade, as you can typically find them in turbochargers…
With CAESES® 4.0, we have further fine-tuned our axial blade design capabilities according to the requests and wishes of our customers. We are also constantly receiving great feedback through our community forum. Thanks to everyone for contributing! We hope you…
In one of our recent customer projects we needed to design a parametric impeller for a CFD-based optimization. The shape of the leading edge had to be asymmetric, which – so far – had not been smoothly supported by CAESES®…
In one of our last posts we briefly touched the topic of writing a custom export in CAESES®, e.g. to make use of proprietary export formats. Our customers use a variety of export formats, and even “standard” formats are often…
Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions in the context of your specific application. We look forward to discussing it together with you!
