CFD best practices applied to turbomachinery

In recent years CFD has become an indispensable tool in an engineer’s arsenal as it can play an important role in the design or analysis process, especially for turbomachinery. Modern CFD codes are robust and capable of very accurate results, however the human and computational effort required can lead to a trade-off between accuracy and time. Understanding the limitations of CFD and managing these uncertainties is therefore vital to ensure successful and quality CFD simulations. Errors in the simulation can be introduced from a variety of sources: model errors (such as turbulence or chemical reactions), systematic (such as choice of boundary conditions or level of geometric details) and numerical (related to discretisation). This presentation aims to inform practitioners on how we keep these errors under control and implement best practices so that simulation and uncertainty level targets can be managed and quantified, ensuring the quality your process requires. Speaker: Dr Sean Petley, Engineering Consultant, Lancaster University Dr Sean Petley is a committee member of the Fluid Machinery Group. Sean currently works as a Research Fellow at Robert Gordon University and an engineering consultant at Lancaster University. In his work Sean uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applied to a wide range of fluid machinery problems, such as centrifugal pumps, Pelton turbines, Kaplan turbines and hydrocyclones.