Air and water are everywhere and can be unpredictable when it comes to engineering. Understanding fluid flows is imperative when it comes to  things like:

• calculating wind loads on high rise buildings
• designing pumps operating in submarines
• designing axial flow jet engines used in aircraft

RPMTurbo has developed a computer program (linearised flow solver) that can accurately and efficiently simulate unsteady 3D viscous flow. RPMTurbo uses this program to perform flutter analysis and acoustic analysis for the manufacturers of large scale turbomachinery.

Fluid flow and supercomputers

RPMTurbo's computer program needs to be run on large memory computers to perform the unsteady flow analysis for industrial machines. To reduce the computing time to a level acceptable for engineering analysis, it also needs to be run in parallel, a task that will be performed by QCIF machines.

The importance of and flutter analysis

Blade flutter is the self-excited vibration of a blade, due to the interaction of structural-dynamic and aerodynamic forces. It is a significant problem for the manufacturers of large-scale turbomachinery such as gas turbines, steam turbines and aircraft engines. It can lead to dramatic blade loss in the short-term and high-cycle fatigue (HCF) in the long-term.

Worldwide production of steam turbines, gas turbines and aircraft engines is approximately 74 billion US dollars per year.  The occurrence of blade flutter has a significant economic cost due to increased development costs, losses due to development delays, maintenance costs, and losses due to downtime. For example, delays in development for a medium-size 500 MW power plant can lead to a loss of revenue up to 2.5 million US dollars per week.  Also, it has been estimated that 30 percent of overall development costs of jet engines is due to HCF management, and that each new jet engine development has on average 2.5 HCF problems which lead to considerable time delays and cost overruns.

Participants

Dr Paul Petrie-Repar, RPMTurbo