A major topic among hydraulic turbine manufacturers, such as VA TECH HYDRO VEVEY, based in Vevey, is to increase performances, i.e. increase efficiency to the highest possible level, increase productivity and reduce noise for environmental aspects. A key point of all three aspects is the unsteady coupling between rotating and non-rotating components of machinery. In parallel, to reduce costs, the tendency is to define more compact designs, where distances between static and rotating components are minimised. Unsteady rotor/stator coupling effects appear then with higher influences than for the standard existing designs.
Within this environment, project HPNURSA is a multi-domain work dedicated to the better understanding of rotating and non-rotating unsteady behaviour of turbomachinery components using numerical flow simulation within a high performance parallel computing hardware environment..
The project Consortium includes the hydro-turbine manufacturers, a spatial turbopump manufacturer, three major European CFD software developers and two internationally recognised research poles involved in turbomachinery research and developments.
The objectives of the project are to reach the capacity of integrating unsteady rotor-stator Computational Fluid Dynamics numerical simulations in the design process of hydro turbines and turbopumps. Such a target asks for validated CFD simulations, which is achieved by testing the developments on two industrial test cases, one pump-turbine and one space turbopump, documented with extensive unsteady experimental data. However, owing to the tremendous amount of data generated from such unsteady simulations, a large part of the project is dedicated to developing the capacity of performing such simulations in parallel mode on a network of mid-range workstations, including NT and LINUX systems, or on large-scale parallel machines. Special emphasis is also made on the development of generic post-processing tools, based on the CGNS standard, to support the analysis and data reduction, also in parallel mode, of this large amount of data resulting from the CFD simulation.
A WEB site has been specifically created for this project and further details and references can be obtained from
http://lmhwww.epfl.ch/HPNURSA/.
