Case Study

Application of 3D inverse design

methods for development of centrifugal
pumps at Grundfos
By Nicholas Pedersen, Chief Engineer - Grundfos

Introduction

Founded in Denmark in 1945, Grundfos now has an annual turnover of 2.6

billion and has an annual production of more than 16 million pump units,
making Grundfos one of the worlds leading pump manufacturers. Circulator
pumps for heating and air-conditioning as well as other centrifugal pumps
for the industry, water supply, sewage and dosing are the main products.
Today Grundfos is the worlds largest manufacturer of circulators, covering
approximately 50% of the world market of these pumps. The Grundfos Group
is represented by more than 80 companies in more than 55 countries.

Grundfos has been a pioneer in utilizing computer aided engineering ( CAE) in

their design, development and manufacturing process for pumps and motors.
They have been using CAD since 1980 and first introduced CFD in 1992. In the Figure 1. Schematic of multistage pump
past 10 years a new integrated CAE and design system based on using ANSYS/
CFX for structural and fluid flow analysis and TURBOdesign 1 for hydrodynamic
design has been used in Grundfos. Grundfos selected TURBOdesign1 as the
hydraulic design system of choice because application of TURBOdesign1
resulted in significant improvement in efficiency and suction performance of
various pump applications. Another important advantage was the possibilities
that TURBOdesign1 and the inverse design based approach provided for
rapid and accurate 3D automatic optimization.

In this case study two cases are presented, one related to the redesign of the
guidevane for multistage pump and the other related to the application of
multipoint optimization.

Case 1 Guidevane for Multistage pump

Figure 2. Prediction of flow in baseline guidevane
The flow field in many conventionally designed guide vanes of the type used for
multistage pump such as that shown in Fig. 1 suffers from a corner separation,
that not only affects the stage performance but also has an adverse effect on
the follow on stage. In Fig. 2 the flow prediction in the baseline guidevane
is shown where a corner separation can be observed on the hub/suction
surface corner.

The guidevane was redesigned by using afore-loaded distribution at the hub

and aft-loaded distribution at the shroud, meaning the corner separation
could be reduced substantially. The loading distribution used is shown in
Fig. 3. This type of loading removes the positive pressure gradient at the hub
and also results in secondary flows from shroud to hub which move the low Figure 3. Loading used for redesign of guidevane
momentum fluid away from the endwall. The resulting flow prediction in
the guidevane designed by TURBOdesign1 is shown in Fig. 4. This shows
substantial reduction in the corner separation. In Fig. 5 the predicted stage
performance of the stage with the new redesign guidevane is compared with
the baseline. There is significant increase in efficiency across the flow range
and peak efficiency improves by 4% point.

Case 2: Multi-point/Multi-disciplinary automatic optimization of

impeller

One of the main issues facing pump manufacturers is the requirement to meet
emission regulations such as EUs ECOdesign directive. These regulations
consider the life cycle emission from the pump and hence mean that the Figure 4. Flow prediction in redesigned guidevane
design of the pump must be done in such a way that considers performance
at multiple operating points. In order to meet these requirements efficiently,
Grundfos has developed an automatic optimization strategy based on
Design of Experiments, Surrogate modelling using Kriging and then running
optimization such as Multi-objective genetic algorithm on the surrogate
model. Fig. 6 shows the schematic of this system. In this system the main
dimensioning is done by using an inhouse meanline code and 3D geometry
generation is done by using TURBOdesign1.

Figure 5. Predicted efficiency of new stage with

Each geometry of impeller in the DOE table is meshed automatically for CFD. redesigned guidevane ( pink) versus baseline
This is then followed by CFD computation at multiple operating points and (navy)
post processing of relevant information such as efficiency, head and power
at various points. In addition, a measure of production fitness of the impeller
geometry for a given manufacturing method is computed. Typical runs
involve about 40 impeller configurations generated by TURBOdesign1. The
resulting surrogate models are generally very accurate. This accuracy is only
possible because TURBOdesign1 can maintain the Euler head for the different
geometries in the DOE table. Furthermore, with the inverse design approach
a large design space can be covered by just a few design parameters related
to blade loading.

The result of the application of this approach has led to substantial

improvement in product performance with reduced design cost and lead Figure 6. . The schematic of surrogate base
time. It has resulted in improving hydraulic efficiency of the pump by 1-2%, optimization method
while extending the maximum efficiency level over a wider range of flow
rates, see Fig. 7.

Figure 7. Comparison of efficiency from automatic

optimization system versus manual design.

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