Tool and Process Improvement for High-Fidelity Compressor Simulations

Compressors for modern gas turbine engines are challenging to simulate. Disparate length and time scales exist in an aggressive adverse pressure gradient environment amongst a wide array of physical phenomena requiring refinement in both space and time. The resulting mesh sizes and CPU time required to complete time-accurate simulations have become staggering, though they will only continue to increase as the simulation strategy switches from Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) to Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES). For the complex compressor flows, this transition has long been necessary. In order to more effectively simulate compressor flows, several tool developments have taken place, which result in better process and reduced engineer effort. Utilizing the Air Force Research Laboratory Department of Defense (DoD) Supercomputing Resource Center (AFRL DSRC) at Wright-Patterson AFB, improvements in geometry handling, grid generation methodologies, and solver features have reduced workload while benefiting simulation quality. Available applications such as Doxygen, Python, VTK, and Subversion created a productive collaboration environment suitable for both development and testing.