Towards Computational Efficient Fully Coupled Aeroelastic Simulations of Turbomachinery Blades with TRACE and CalculiX

Abstract

In the industrial design of turbomachinery blades their aeroelastic behaviour is most commonly investigated by methods, that use linearization or rely on unidirectional coupling. To circumvent the limitations of those methods a new fully coupled simulation in the time domain with the structural solver CalculiX and the turbomachinery CFD solver TRACE is currently developed and presented in this paper. The coupling library preCICE is chosen to couple the mentioned elaborated single physics solvers due to its focus on high performance computing applications. Within this work the preCICE adapter for CalculiX has recently been enabled to work with a special CalculiX method, that allows to investigate dedicated eigenforms of the blades or other structural objects. It is furthermore shown that the use of this CalculiX method can lead to a massive speedup for use cases, where the structural dynamics response can be well described by a piece-wise linear approximation within each increment. On the other hand a completely new preCICE adapter for TRACE has been developed and is introduced here. The preCICE-coupled system of CalculiX and TRACE is successfully validated against a TRACE-internal coupling approach by investigating a simple testcase with a NACA profile blade that shows good agreement.

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