Session: 34-06 Axial compressor design methods

Paper Number: 124877

124877 - Simulation of Full Featured Compressor Using Massive Parallel Unsteady CFD 

One main goal of using CFD in the compressor design process is to reduce the number of test runs in order to speed up the design process and to minimize cost. This work presents the next step in achieving this goal. Unsteady simulations of a high-fidelity full annulus compressor rig model with more than 5 billion mesh nodes were performed at part-speed conditions on tens of thousands of cores. The geometric features include among others full cavity geometries, blade clearances and VSV penny gaps. For these comprehensive simulations, an optimized CFD solver was used providing a speedup of 7x compared to its legacy version. This was achieved by optimizing the parallelization layer, by code profiling and load balance optimization as well as I/O reduction. For post processing, the in-situ technic has been used to output 1D, 2D and 3D flow data at affordable time and disk usage. The results of this simulations were compared to state-of-the-art steady-state simulations of the same model as well as to the actual rig test data.

The presented work demonstrates through the example of one of the largest industrial-grade unsteady simulations to date on one hand the significantly improved scalability of the used CFD solver and on the other hand the opportunities and potential of using such kind of high-fidelity CFD models in order to improve and accelerate the compressor design process.

Presenting Author: Jan Suhrmann Rolls-Royce Deutschland Ltd & Co KG

Presenting Author Biography: Born 1982 in Berlin, Germany
Studying of Mechanical Engineering/Aerospace technology at TU-Dresden and TU-Munich
PhD at TU-Berlin
Since 2013: Development engineer at Rolls-Royce Deutschland

Authors:

Jan Suhrmann Rolls-Royce Deutschland Ltd & Co KG
Paolo Adami GE Aerospace
Vladislav Ganine University of Surrey, Thermofluids Systems UTC
Rigel Falcao Do Couto Alves Capgemini SE
Oliver Reutter German Aerospace Center DLR