Machines, Vol. 13, Pages 307: Design of Rotors in Centrifugal Pumps Using the Topology Optimization Method and Parallel Computing in the Cloud

Machines doi: 10.3390/machines13040307

Authors:
Xavier Andrés Arcentales
Danilo Andrés Arcentales
Wilfredo Montealegre

Designing flow machines is challenging due to numerous free geometrical parameters. This work aims to develop a parallelized computational algorithm in MATLAB version R2020a to design the rotor of a radial flow in a centrifugal pump using the finite-element method (FEM), topology optimization method (TOM), and parallel cloud computing (bare-metal vs. virtual machine). The goal is to minimize a bi-objective function comprising energy dissipation and vorticity within half a rotor circumference. When only minimizing energy dissipation (wd = 1, wr = 0), the performance achieved is 5.88 Watts. Considering both energy dissipation and vorticity (wd = 0.8, wr = 0.2), the performance is 5.94 Watts. These topology results are then extended to a full 3D model using Ansys Fluent version 18.2 to validate the objective functions minimized by TOM. The algorithm is parallelized and executed on multiple CPU cores in the cloud on two different platforms: Amazon Web Services (virtual machine) and Equinix (bare-metal machine), to accelerate the blade design process. In conclusion, mathematical optimization tools aid engineering designers in achieving non-intuitive designs and enhancing results.

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Xavier Andrés Arcentales www.mdpi.com