AEROSPACE

New CFdesign Motion Module Helps Engineers Reduce Turbomachinery Design and Validation Process Time from 200 hours to 2 Hours:

Blue Ridge Numerics, Inc. today announced that Cornell Pump Company experienced a 100x speed up of a full transient system-level simulation and performance curve generation using the new CFdesign Motion and high performance computing (HPC) Modules, released earlier this month.  Cornell design engineers were able to perform a series of transient simulations to develop a complete performance curve, enabling evaluation of a centrifugal pump design in only two hours, down from 200 hours, resulting in a significant reduction in product development time. Similar to the Cornell team, multitasking engineers designing high performance fans, blowers, turbomachinery, and many other products can now benefit from the upgraded Motion Module, allowing for more iterations upfront in the design process.  

$(document).ready(function(){ thumbView("","","","","","on","/clientfiles/images/magnify.png",15,15); }); View of internal flow patterns of Cornell’s centrifugal pump, modeled with CFdesign, highlighting the pressure of the liquid and the pattern of the flow.

“In the past design teams have typically had to choose between a slower simulation time for a full system-level transient model simulation or a less accurate fixed-rotor approach,” said Derrek Cooper, product manager, Blue Ridge Numerics. “With the new capabilities in the Motion Module, CFdesign now offers a more complete and reliable solution that is faster than any other options out there, so design teams no longer have to sacrifice accuracy for speed.”

The significant performance increases the Cornell team experienced using CFdesign will have major implications for development of new pumps.  Beyond cutting computer simulation time from weeks to hours, it is expected to reduce the number of pump castings that have to be made for physical testing. Eliminating just one of the physical tests could save the Cornell team as much as three months of development time.

“With much faster running speeds, we will be able to do many more simulation runs in less time,” said Andrew Enterline, design engineer, Cornell Pump Company.  “We’ll spend more time designing the product and less time and money in pattern rework, re-pouring castings, and physical development testing, helping us create more optimized product designs from the start.”

In the past, generating a typical pump curve for the Cornell design team required 300 iterations at 1.5 iterations per hour to evaluate a single design, so the team explored options to speed up the development cycle.  New rotational algorithms for transient rotating modeling included in the latest release of the Motion Module help speed up simulation time by 20x on a standard desktop computer, allowing Cornell and other design teams to more quickly and accurately evaluate performance curves. In addition, the Motion Module can be combined with the new CFdesign HPC Module to provide an overall 100x speed up. Cornell leveraged the power of the Motion and HPC Modules to speed up their design process by partnering with R Systems, a provider of high-end computing resources for research, to conduct their simulations on an 8 node HPC cluster setup, allowing them to complete 300 iterations now in only two hours.