In the development of industrial turbomachinery, the aerodynamic designer is faced with many complex fluid flow problems. In the mid to late 1980’s, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software was developed to assist in the solution of these flow fields. Initially applied only by high end gas turbine or jet engine designers, these sophisticated tools eventually found their way to engineers at industrial turbomachinery manufacturers. However, it has only been in the last five to ten years that industrial users have begun to make more widespread use of CFD. There are a variety of reasons for this slow adoption.

The past decade has seen considerable growth in the application of CFD to centrifugal compressors. As computational methods applicable to compressors have improved, and computing power has increased dramatically, so has the scope of application. Impellers, diffusers, return channels, inlets, volutes and other components are now routinely analyzed, sometimes simultaneously. With the expansion of CFD, the user is now faced with many choices in establishing the most effective and efficient way to perform a given analysis. Advice, guidance and reports as to the experiences of other practitioners are of considerable value. This paper aims to investigate and compare relevant computational factors such as mesh type and density, and CFD solver discretization scheme as applied to the impeller, vaneless diffuser and volute of a centrifugal compressor.