Demonstration of an Aerodynamic Design Process for Turbomachines using Open Source Tools

This paper demonstrates an aerodynamic design process for turbomachines for compressible flows, using exclusively open source software tools. Some relevant software already existed and few additional components were required, which have been developed mainly by students and are available at ftp.lfa.mw.tum.de. The geometry of turbomachine blades is described with a newly developed NURBS based blade designer. One-dimensional preliminary analysis is done with OpenOffice.org Calc and an extended mean line program, where loss models are already included. For two-dimensional through-flow computations a compressible streamline curvature method was implemented. Two-dimensional blade-to-blade and three-dimensional simulations are performed with the CFD toolbox OpenFOAM. The two- and three-dimensional results are visualized and analyzed using the open source postprocessing tool ParaView. The presented tools are regularly used in student projects. A generic one stage axial compressor was created with the workflow as a showcase in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the open source software tools.