Application and Validation of CFD in a Turbomachinery Design System

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) has enjoyed widespread use in the turbomachinery industry for some time. When coupled with other solvers, such as meanline and streamline curvature, it can be an integral part of a comprehensive design and analysis system. The pbCFD (Pushbutton CFD®) product is the CFD component of Concepts NREC’s Agile Engineering Design System®. It is a structured grid CFD flow solver optimized for turbomachinery analysis. Concepts NREC has made an extensive validation effort over a wide range of diverse turbomachinery stages including, compressors, pumps, and turbines for both radial and axial machines. Detailed comparison to test data of 10 different stages is shown in this paper and clearly demonstrates the high performance of pbCFD in quantifying fluid dynamic losses and pressure changes over a wide range of geometries and flow conditions.