SpinOffs

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 sessions and presented two papers. In case you were not able to go, here are the abstracts from the two papers:

Summer is almost here, at least in my hemisphere, so here are some of the best places around the world people in the turbomachinery industry might find interesting! Know of another? Share your favorite!

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 or move a fluid. When the fluid is a gas, the turbomachinery equipment is typically referred to as a fan, blower or compressor. This blog will explore the differences between these three devices and where they are used.  

In my previous blog post, “How the Design of a Wind Turbine Differs from other Types of Turbines”, I showed that the very small pressure drop across the rotor makes wind turbine design different from other types of turbines. This blog will focus on the best method to design a wind turbine rotor based on the fact that only kinetic energy is available to extract from the wind.

In this blog series, I covered a lot of thermo-fluid options in engineering analysis, from the simplest perfect gas (When Perfect is Good Enough – Perfect Gas Models) and ideal liquid, (Fluid Modeling: Liquified ) to much more complex approaches (Going Through a Phase – Modeling Phase Change with Cubics) and (Getting Real – Advanced Real Gas Models). In this blog, I’ll cover the ultimate in thermo-fluid modeling: non-equilibrium modeling. It's rare and expensive, sort of like the Schorschbrau’s Schorschbock 57, a beer that sells for $275/bottle.

When fluids undergo a phase change (see Phase Change - Make Mine a Double), it typically has a very significant effect of the flow behavior and energy level of the system.  Some examples of this are: cavitation in a pump, condensing near the exit of a steam turbine, even the everyday phenomenon of the weather is basically a never-ending phase change process of water, and its interaction with air. 

Our CTO, Mark Anderson, takes a fundamental look at simple stall and its impact on turbochargers stability and range. This is the second video in this 2-part series. Be sure to watch Part 1 first!

Turbomachinery performance is almost always analyzed and tested with a fixed inflow condition. In other words, the assumption is that the inflow fluid temperature and pressure is defined and unchanging over the map of machine performance. Since varying conditions often exist in practice, the performance maps are sometimes normalized, as shown in the figure below. The pressure ratio of a compressor is plotted versus a corrected mass flow range and rotational speed. 

Our CTO, Mark Anderson, takes a fundamental look at simple stall and its impact on turbochargers stability and range. This is the first video in this 2-part series. 

I work with water a lot here at Concepts NREC. Water is frequently the fluid that flows through various types of rotating equipment we design to either release or store energy. Mankind’s fascination with manipulating the movement of water goes way back; read Mark Anderson’s blog on  Early Water Handling to see just how far back it goes. Today, more advanced turbomachinery is used for both hydroelectric and hydrokinetic applications.