Asym­met­ric Profiles for Impeller Design

In one of our recent customer projects we needed to design a para­met­ric impeller for a CFD-based opti­miza­tion. The shape of the leading edge had to be asym­met­ric, which — so far — had not been smoothly sup­ported by CAESES® in a direct and con­ve­nient way. Actually, we needed this piece of func­tion­al­ity also for fans and pumps rather urgently, where each of our project engi­neers applied dif­fer­ent tech­niques to set up asym­met­ric shapes. So the time had come to make it more easily available.

In CAESES®, the so called ​“offset curve” is the first choice for creating thick­ness-based 3D curves. And this works fine already, but it uses only one sym­met­ric thick­ness dis­tri­b­u­tion for the profile. Hence, we decided to quickly add some more func­tion­al­ity to this offset curve.

Our idea: Create two offset curves with two dif­fer­ent thick­ness dis­tri­b­u­tions, and put them together in order to have a single 3D curve in the end. For each offset curve, we generate only half a profile (suction side and pressure side, respec­tively). This can be done by deac­ti­vat­ing the option ​“both sides”. For the pressure side, we simply swap the profile location. The fol­low­ing screen­shot shows the feature def­i­n­i­tion that does the job:

This took us just a few minutes to imple­ment, and there is nothing new to learn for a CAESES® user. With this, CAESES® is now well equipped to readily give you any kind of profile shape in the context of impeller or fan design, may it be sym­met­ric or asymmetric. 

Inter­ested in trying out CAESES® for your appli­ca­tion? Then download and install our free version today! It is fully free for com­mer­cial work, and you can directly start setting up your own intel­li­gent model :-)

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