Quick Guide: Blade Geometry Export for ANSYS TurboGrid

Do you design tur­bo­ma­chin­ery blades in CAESES® and you want to make use of ANSYS Tur­bo­Grid for meshing the variable geometry? Then check out the fol­low­ing quick guide which shows you the export pro­ce­dure. It’s super fast and easy! Such a setup is directly ready for highly auto­mated shape opti­miza­tion workflows. 

Where We Start From

Let’s assume we have a para­met­ric blade model in CAESES® where we can change all blade char­ac­ter­is­tics by a set of design vari­ables (e.g. chord, camber, thick­ness dis­tri­b­u­tion etc.). No matter if you consider a cen­trifu­gal or axial blade — as a result, we receive a single blade surface:

Our goal is to auto­mat­i­cally create *.curve files which can be used by Tur­bo­Grid. Here is an example where *.curve files have been imported into TurboGrid:

Step 1: Add the Export Features

We need func­tion­al­ity to convert the blade surface and the merid­ional contours into *.curve files. These features can be down­loaded e.g. from the public forum. We also offer main­tained feature def­i­n­i­tions, just get in touch with us. All you need to do is to simply drag & drop the Tur­bo­Grid export features into your CAESES® project. They will appear in the node ​“Feature Definitions”:

Step 2: Con­fig­ure the Blade

Create and select the blade feature. Set a name and choose the para­met­ric blade surface from your project. The number of sections and number of points per section can also be set. That’s it for the blade.

Step 3: Con­fig­ure Hub and Shroud

Create and select the Tur­bo­Grid contour feature. Set the file name and the hub curve as well as the number of points per section. Do the same for the shroud.

Step 4: Run the Export

Now it’s time to trigger the export manually: Just select each feature and click on the ​“run” button at the top of the window. When you run the blade export, the sections are created and visu­al­ized in the 3D view. The export files (blade.curve, hub.curve, shroud.curve) are auto­mat­i­cally put into the current design direc­tory of the CAESES® project. This is con­ve­nient if you do studies since these files are then stored in the cor­re­spond­ing design direc­tory of the variants.

Step 5: What about Automation?

If you would like to auto­mat­i­cally generate geometry variants of your blade along with the cor­re­spond­ing *.curve files, then you simply trigger these features in the design engines as a design post-pro­cess­ing step. Learn more about design engines … If you use your own opti­miza­tion tools (optiS­Lang, Optimus, Mod­e­Fron­tier, Dakota, …), then run CAESES® in batch mode and add the run-commands to your fsc-script:

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