The Practical Application Of CFD In The Design Of Industrial Centrifugal Impellers.

Abstract

The practical application of computational fluid dynamics software in the industrial turbomachinery design process is discussed. Such codes have been used for years in the design of gas turbines, but have long been underutilized by the process compressor world. New streamlined or specialized solvers have been developed which minimize the effort required to obtain CFD results on axisymmetric components, i.e., impellers, diffusers, etc. One such code (BTOB3D developed by Dr. William Dawes) and the postprocessors and plots used to interpret the results are described. Three sample cases are offered to illustrate the use of the code for comparison of designs; and for flow visualization. Finally, comments are offered regarding the present limitations of CFD tools.