SpinOffs

The previous blog, Entropy Happens… Deal with It! ended with the statement, “That’s how Concepts NREC deals with the constraints of the Second Law of Thermodynamics when designing high-efficiency turbomachinery – we literally put entropy to work!” That blog not only lead to an increase in sales of bumper sticker sales emblazoned with “Working on it, STAY TUNED!”, it led to a request to explore this statement in a little more detail – particularly as the idea might apply to the analysis, design and manufacturing of turbomachinery.

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, by their nature, require advanced fluid dynamics as well as very high mechanical complexity.  Whenever you make a trade-off between performance and durability or performance and weight/inertia, you are doing an MDO study. Adding MDO software to your traditional design approaches can give you additional insight into the trade-offs, and save you time by avoiding the need for manual iteration.

If there’s one thing good about sitting in snarled traffic in Boston, it’s that you get to see some very original bumper stickers. The most recent bumper sticker I saw was probably the strangest one, no doubt created by some engineering professor who doesn’t see that the glass is half full, but that it has a safety factor of 2! Nevertheless, the bumper sticker stated the obvious when one thinks about it: ENTROPY HAPPENS! And then, to emphasize the point, the artist has the letters slowly “evaporating,” demonstrating graphically that entropy proceeds from order to chaos.

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!