For most turbomachinery engineers, optimization isn’t a new idea. It’s a critical part of their workflow that can’t be overlooked. But sometimes that crucial step isn’t easy to get to.
It’s no secret that turbomachinery design has been one of the most demanding CAE environments, thanks to tight tolerances, complex physics, and long design cycles. That hasn’t changed in 2026, but...
Many of us have come to appreciate the expedience that 1D (meanline) analysis provides when scoping out a new design or revisiting a legacy design for use in a new application. However, we also know...
This post covers one of the fundamental issues that makes rotordynamics a unique subject: The Gyroscopic Effect. The gyroscopic effect can be observed in the behavior of spinning tops, fidget...
Hydrogen is attracting a lot of interest in different circles these days from: propulsion, to energy storage, to personal transportation. The most obvious benefit of hydrogen fuel is a total lack of...
Because of its promise as a non-polluting fuel, hydrogen is currently a very popular topic among the energy and turbomachinery communities. If hydrogen is reacted with pure oxygen, the thermal energy...
This post is about one of the most useful design tools for rotordynamics of turbomachinery: The Undamped Critical Speed Map. A critical speed map can provide a great deal of insight on the potential...
Dave Japikse, the CEO/Chairman & Founder of Concepts NREC, discusses the integrated software tools developed specifically for the design and analysis of turbomachinery. Examples include thermodynamic...
With so many papers out there, I like to pass the word along when a particularly good one comes my way. My favorite paper for 2021 was titled “SELECTING A COMPRESSOR MERIDIONAL TOPOLOGY: AXIAL,...
It is not a secret that when designing turbomachinery components there is a trade-off between the performance and durability. I challenge any aero or structural designer to highlight a geometric...
Dave Schowalter, Director of Global Software Sales, introduces you to Claudio Raia, our newest team member and the Managing Director of Concepts NREC Europe. Welcome Claudio!
The compressor is generally one of the most sensitive components of an sCO2 cycle. This makes it a challenge to design a robust compressor while keeping the thermodynamic cycle close to optimal.
Low reaction stages are often used as control stages of steam turbines, ORC turbines, drive and rocket turbopump turbines. Some of the benefits of low reaction stages vs higher reaction stages are:
Introduction: With the advancements in computation power, optimization is not just limited to academics and research anymore. It can now be realistically used for industrial designs. There are...
When starting a turbomachinery design, the first choice an engineer has to make is the thermodynamic model. The actual fluid type (air, water, R1234ze, etc) is usually clear enough, but what model...
Concepts NREC’s TurboOPT IITM product was created to provide designers a link between Concepts NREC meanline and 3D design products and 3rd party optimization products. The use of optimization in...
Concepts NREC’s pbPost™ product was created to provide designers a turbomachinery-specific pre- and post-processing tool to link our flagship 3D design product, AxCent®, and our partner NUMECA...
AxCent® has long been recognized as the premier 3D design software for turbomachinery components.
In 2019, the Aungier model was added to COMPAL®, our compressor meanline design and analysis product. The Aungier model is a globally accepted, physics-based loss approach to aid in the design of...
A small turbine (for ORC, air liquification processes) , operating with low volumetric flows at inlet and significant pressure ratio in a single stage configuration (to reduce costs) is often...
Automated optimization is becoming more and more common place in the turbomachinery industry today. What was once exclusively the domain of academics and high-end researchers, has become much more...
This blog article is a follow up for the earlier blog “Coupled Optimization of Preliminary Design Geometry of Low Flow Steam Turbine with Curtis Stage Layout and Rankine Cycle Parameters”, which...
Designing turbines for low flow Rankine Cycle for steam is challenging due to their small size, manufacturing restrictions, clearances and cost constraints. Such turbines operate at significant...
In many instances, the design of new turbofan engine is an iterative process of optimizing engine cycle parameters (i.e. thermodynamics) and executing preliminary design geometry of engine...
Why supercritical CO2? Super critical carbon dioxide (sCO2) is one of the hottest topics in the turbomachinery world right now. From my own experience, I remember when the subject occupied a few...
I remember my geography high school teacher talking about maps and how the different projections of the actual globe change the way we visualize it in 2D views. Figure 1 - Photo by Muhammad Haikal...
If you design turbomachinery for a living, you are already doing multidisciplinary optimization (MDO), regardless of whether you have a special software tool with MDO built in or not. Turbomachines,...
When discussing the efficiency of transforming one form of energy to another, circularity is the way to go. Anyone who has spent even a little time studying engineering thermodynamics knows that the...
Wow, Concepts NREC had a lot going on at this year's ASME Turbo Expo 2019 in Phoenix, AZ! We held our North American CAE User Group Meeting, spoke to over 200 people at our booth, chaired several...
Turbomachinery equipment is generally segmented based on whether it extracts energy (e.g., turbines) or adds energy (e.g., pumps and compressors). The addition of energy is usually used to compress...
In a previous blog, Fluid Phenomena Primer: Energy Versus Temperature, Specific Heat, I explained the behavior for gas phase fluids and how the temperature is affected at high energy levels. In...
What is a perfect gas? A perfect gas is one that has a linear variation in energy with respect to temperature and a linear variation in pressure with respect to temperature at constant volume. The...
As one might expect, the temperature of a substance typically increases as energy is added to it. This is the case with most substances in all phases. The exception is when a substance crosses to a...
PCs and workstations are getting faster every year, following Moore's Law. With all this power and speed, the “virtual prototyping” of turbomachinery, using CFD simulations and optimization...
In my last blog, Specific Speed Demystified, I covered the mathematical definition of specific speed and how it relates to flow and work coefficient. The concept of specific speed has been a guiding...
Years ago, I got a pocketknife as a gift, and I absolutely loved it, still do. It came in handy during my college years, when I was really into camping and trekking. As the years went by, it stayed...
Have you ever needed to know the exact geometry of a compressor that has been running for years in your process plant? Perhaps you need to analyze how it would perform if the process fluid had to be...
Gifts for Engineers can usually be segmented into a few categories: Things you have to put together, science fiction, gaming, new technology, and witty phrases printed on stuff. A Google search of...
Most turbomachines need to operate across a range of fluid flow rates and speeds. This is obvious in transportation applications where gas turbine engines and turbochargers need to operate at all of...
I think we can all agree that designing turbomachinery is hard. There are just so many moving parts (pun intended) in the design process, and they are all interconnected. When you change the blade...
Gas turbines (or GTs) are important in the power generation sector due to their high efficiency, cleaner emissions and faster startup than old coal-powered plants. These power generators can range...
Frequently, there is a need to reconstruct 2D and 3D geometry from reported or measured surface data points. In most cases, the provided surface data include significant amounts of noise for various...
Computational fluid dynamic analysis (CFD) has become a standard part of the turbomachinery design process. Within Concepts NREC’s Agile Engineering Design System, FINE/Turbo, from our Partner NUMECA...
Ideally, the exit flow angle for an impeller should be the same as the exit blade metal angle. However, the exit flow angle deviates from the blade guidance at the impeller exit due to the finite...
If you are a turbomachinery engineer, you know you can spend days, weeks, or even months analyzing various design iterations, looking for the optimal choice for the application. When you go to...
Many energy recovery, drive cycles (Organic and Steam Rankine cycles) and rocket propulsion cycles require the use of a turbine that operates at low volumetric flow and high-pressure ratio....
Many gas turbines with radial compressors utilize a radial-to-axial inlet duct upstream of the first compressor stage. Aside from the fact that flow in the duct generates aerodynamic losses, the flow...
High-efficiency, low-cavitation pumps often require a screw type inducer to treat the inflow to the main radial/mixed flow pump blades. Efficiency and head rise, split between inducer and main pump,...
Engineers, by their very nature, like to design new things. To us, there is an undeniable appeal to creating something no one has ever seen before. However, there are compelling reasons to leverage...
Concepts NREC just had its most successful year ever in software sales. Why? It really comes down to two things, the first is our team, we have some incredibly talented people developing our software...
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the profession that is creating all the robots was eventually replaced by them? It could happen. Engineering is all about applying laws, measurements, facts, and analysis to...
Can you really get something for nearly nothing? In many cases, a properly-designed compressor casing treatment can extend compressor operating range without having to pay an appreciable efficiency...
Beyond being a fun tongue twister, visualizing the velocity vectors is probably the most useful and intuitive information available in turbomachinery design. Many fundamental parameters can be...
Finding the root cause of a failure by narrowing down multiple overlaid symptoms can be a long and tedious process—and very often the true underlying problem is not what one might expect by a casual...
I was a firefighter (we never call ourselves firemen) for more than ten years. While this was only a part time, volunteer gig, I was a turbomachinery developer and modeler as my full-time job....
A common struggle for mechanical engineers using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools is the time-consuming process of moving geometry between the CAE system and Computer Aided Design (CAD)...
Three-dimensional flow fields typically have some degree of distortion in the flow properties and flow profiles across a given cross section. These distortions can be quite significant in regions...
One of the most important design choices facing a chiller compressor designer is whether to utilize open or shrouded impellers. The impacts of this verdict are wide ranging, which arguably makes this...
New engine development is a costly endeavor and making the right decisions early in the engine design is extremely important. It requires multi-disciplinary consideration of the engine thermodynamic...
In May of 2016, Concepts NREC and NUMECA International announced a strategic partnership to combine their products to provide a comprehensive turbomachinery design and analysis system. In November of...
The biggest reason to use an integrated turbomachinery design and analysis environment is speed. Basically, having everything you need in one place makes a big difference!
Arbitrary blade section profiling is an essential part of designing high performance axial turbines and compressors. In most cases such blade section models are formed by hybrid use of arbitrary...
Some of my other blogs have touched on how important it is to consider manufacturing methods during the design phase. This one will show exactly how manufacturing methods impact performance. We will...
This Blog post gives a brief outline of the throughflow method for turbomachinery flows and presents the calculated performance results of a Single-Stage Axial-Flow Compressor validation.
Thanks to early pioneering efforts by Dr. David Japikse and his team, Concepts NREC has been at the forefront of turbomachinery design optimization for the past 15 years.
Engineers who design aircraft engines face a conundrum. Gas turbines in aircraft engines have to operate at very high temperatures for thermal efficiency and power output. These high temperatures put...
Supercritical CO2 cycles have the potential to significantly improve efficiency and reduce emissions in power generation. However, the unique fluid dynamic properties of supercritical CO2 that enable...
The turbomachinery and software industries have evolved, in tandem, to high levels of maturity. On the engineering side, improved modeling capability and access to more powerful computational...
Expanding design capabilities for advanced high-performance turbines for steam and organic Rankine cycle power generation is a constant area of focus in developing Concepts NREC’s Agile Engineering...
Achieving optimum performance and efficiency in a gas turbine engine requires pushing operating temperatures as high as possible. In fact, many gas turbine engines in service today operate at hot-gas...