Researchers at NTU are tapping HPC resources to investigate methods to improve turbine blade aerodynamics that could lead to energy and fuel savings.

Flow separation is a common occurrence in many engineering problems, especially in industries like the aerospace and automotive sectors. The separation of a laminar or turbulent boundary layer can severely lower the efficiency of a turbine blade, for example.

To address this, a team of researchers from Nanyang Technological University’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are leveraging NSCC’s high performance computing resources to investigate the use of vortex generators (VGs) to mitigate flow separation across a sharp-edge ramp. Using numerical simulations, the team qualitatively evaluates and compares flow characteristics with and without VGs to determine the resulting performance enhancements.

The team’s fundamental research on flow separation and recirculation as well as on flow control strategies based on bio-inspired vortex generators, provides deep insights to performance enhancement and optimisation. The research findings help to uncover design parameters and optimal configurations for direct implementation so that improvements in energy / fuel savings can be achieved.

To find out more about the NSCC’s HPC resources and how you can tap on them, please contact [email protected].

NSCC NewsBytes July 2021