The future of turbomachinery is being shaped by the need for greater efficiency and performance across various applications, for reducing environmental impact and for adaptability to a changing market landscape.
pSeven offers turbomachinery designers and simulation engineers a powerful collaborative environment for automating simulation workflows, reducing development costs, and improving the performance of open machines, such as propellers, windmills, and enshrouded fans, as well as closed machines, such as steam or water turbines and jet engines.
Manufacturers of rotating equipment appplied across different industries, such as aerospace, energy and marine, face a variety of challenges, including achieving higher efficiency, managing thermal stresses, reducing emissions of CO2 and NOx, and handling complex flow phenomena, particularly in high-pressure and high-speed environments. Furthermore, ensuring robustness against manufacturing imperfections and operating conditions is crucial, requiring advanced design and simulation techniques.
High-fidelity simulation and analysis software tools, such as those for computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics, have become essential for addressing turbomachinery design challenges. The next step to further reduce design lead time and cost while improving product technical specs is to automate engineering processes and apply design exploration tools in a collaborative engineering environment.
Users of pSeven products automate and speed-up simulation workflows, capture and transfer knowlege and apply design exploration to upgrade product performance and lower the development costs of various types of rotating equipment, such as steam turbines, fans and air compressors, marine propellers, wind turbines, pumps and more.
At ETN Global, we believe that by fostering open collaboration and aligning industry needs with emerging talent and technology, the turbomachinery sector can remain a competitive enabler of the energy transition.
- Giuseppe Tilocca, Energy & Turbomachinery Network (ETN) Global’s Technical Lead
Design Exploration capabilities of the pSeven solutions allow for an efficient and quick search for compromises between conflicting demands for high efficiency and respect for mechanical constraints. These capabilities encompass Design of Experiments (DoE), multidisciplinary and multi-objective optimization and the rich family of Precictive Modeling techniques to speed up the simulations.
Below are some types of real-world monodisciplinary (CFD, structural, etc.) and multidisciplinary, e.g. coupled aero-thermo-mechanical, multi-objective design optimization problems that can be solved using pSeven solutions to maximize the efficiency, minimize the mass or improve other characteristics of turbomachinery components.
The complexity of turbomachinery design necessitates sophisticated design tools and simulation techniques. While these tools provide engineers with valuable insights into the performance measures of interest, they can be challenging and time-consuming to implement on a larger scale. Due to the large number of employees involved, data transfer becomes an issue. Employees must conduct different simulations and manage the exchanged data formats.
pSeven solutions helps turbomachinery engineers accelerate simulation workflows and avoid errors thanks to workflow automation capabilities. It enables users to capture complex engineering workflows by visually modeling every step of the process, such as building geometry models, mesh generation, post-processing of the results and data exchange between different software. These workflows can be automated to run repetitive simulations with minimal user intervention, reused, shared and adapted for similar tasks or projects ensuring consistency and saving time.
Manufacturers of rotating equipment can easily integrate a whole variety of widely used in the industry tools into the multidisciplinary workflows:
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One of the most important issues to ensure operational safety is the tuning of rotor blades’ eigenfrequencies under operating conditions away from possible resonances with the rotation frequencies and pulsations of the steam flow. Within the described project, this task is solved using an automated module for determining the eigenfrequencies of the blades.
settings Use case
Compressor performance map is a graphical representation of compressor's efficiency, pressure ratio and surge limit across its operating range. It is an important tool for designers and engineers to analyze and optimize the compressor's performance under different operating conditions. One way to build a compressor map is to run a series of CFD simulations, but it requires a lot of manual work and rework of a simulation engineer. This use case demonstrates how the process of a compressor map construction can be automated using pSeven Enterprise and the benefits of such an approach.
Turbomachinery design is a multidisciplinary field that requires expertise in aerodynamics, thermodynamics, structural mechanics, and, often, acoustics. It also requires tools for data analysis and design optimization. Achieving optimal performance, efficiency, and reliability of machines involves complex interactions between these disciplines.
pSeven Enterpise provides web-native collaborative engineering capabilities to capture complex multidisciplinary workflows. These capabilities improve collaboration between departments and engineers, ultimately reducing development cycles and costs. They provide simultaneous, multi-user access to workflows and enable real-time co-authoring. Shared workspaces are designed for departments or teams to share and edit workflows, results and files, depending on user roles.
settings Use case
Jet engines' design is very complex, and the combination of physics and multiple teams are involved to build its digital prototype. In this use case, a master workflow is built in pSeven Enterprise that references single study workflows created and maintained by different enterprise teams. This ensures the preservation of knowledge and expertise, practices and design methods, as well as reusing existing data and computational experiments.
Simulation methodologies must be democratized to reach the vast engineering population and be produced on a large enough scale to make a real difference.
With pSeven Enterprise, Methods & Tools department and advanced users can share their knowledge and simulation methodologies with other users across and outside the organization in a form of workflow-powered web apps that are stored in a centralized location called AppsHub.
Simulation web apps are the next level of automation, giving citizen users the ability to conduct studies and perform tasks by simplifying the data input and task configuration. Web apps help to automate routine engineering tasks and democratize the use of simulation at enterprise scale.
Sungmok Hwang, Hyunmok Kim, Seungjin Kwang, Cheol Yoo
Wiley Online Library
Victor Cantu, Application Engineer, pSeven SAS
pSeven User Conference 2024
Khalil Traidi, Ingénieur R&T - Chef projet, Safran Tech; Nina Moëllo, Application Engineer, DATADVANCE SAS
pSeven User Conference 2023
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