Demonstration of an Aerodynamic Design Process for Turbomachines Using Open Source Software Tools

Abstract

This paper demonstrates an aerodynamic design process for turbomachines for compressible flows, using exclusively open source software tools. Some relevant software already existed and few additional components were required, which have been developed mainly by students and are available at ftp.lfa.mw.tum.de. The geometry of turbomachine blades is described with a newly developed NURBS based blade designer. One-dimensional preliminary analysis is done with OpenOffice.org Calc and an extended mean line program, where loss models are already included. For two-dimensional throughflow computations a compressible streamline curvature method was implemented. Two-dimensional blade-to-blade and threedimensional simulations are performed with the CFD toolbox OpenFOAM. The two-and three-dimensional results are visualized and analyzed using the open source postprocessing tool ParaView. The presented tools are regularly used in student projects. A generic one stage axial compressor was created with the workflow as a showcase in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the open source software tools.

Performance prediction of transonic axial multistage compressor based on one-dimensional meanline method

“…The models applied in the 1D meanline program directly determine whether the compressors' operating behavior can be calculated accurately or not, [9][10][11] especially for transonic compressor. At present, only the surge prediction models of Koch and Smith 12 and Aungier 10 are the widely-used 1D models in the public literature, which are all based on 2D diffuser analogy.…”