feature impeller design
Advanced design software for
pumps
Design software based on the inverse design approach offers a number of advantages for
the hydrodynamic design of pump components such as impellers. M. Zangeneh, founding
director of UK-based Advanced Design Technology (ADT) and professor of thermofluids at
University College London, discusses and illustrates the capabilities of this inverse approach
as embodied in ADT’s TURBOdesign-1 software. The advanced features of the company’s latest
release, TURBOdesign-1 v. 3.0, are highlighted.
M
any of the leading pump
companies in Japan, the
USA and Europe currently
use the TURBOdesign-1 design code
from Advanced Design Technology
(ADT) in their design systems. In
response to what compelled them
to consider TURBOdesign-1, these
companies have highlighted the
following commercial drivers:
• Global competition. The need to
compete globally means that the
company’s products need to be
superior in terms of performance,
cost and in meeting the customer’s
requirements as closely as possible
(customized designs).
Figure 1. Schematic
of the direct or
conventional design
approach in which
blade shape is
modified by trial and
error.
Figure 2. Schematic
diagram showing
the design process
by TURBOdesign-1.
28 0262 1762/07 © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
• Continual price pressure and
margin compression. Important
to reduce both manufacturing and
developments costs.
• Reduced time to market. This
will help reduce design and
development time and hence costs.
• Skills shortages. Many companies
face problems in recruiting skilled
hydrodynamic designers and
the time required to train a new
graduate engineer in hydrodynamic
design using conventional design
methods is too long and hence
considered as an expensive
investment.
• Requirement to supply customized
products. In many applications
customers expect to get designs
that meet their requirements
in terms of efficiency, suction
performance and motor size and
no longer accept a choice from a
pump series that only half meets
their requirements.
• Ease of use. This feature of
TURBOdesign-1 not only helps
to improve the productivity of
designers but also is the main reason
why young graduate engineers can
be trained very quickly to make
them productive in hydrodynamic
design.
Helping meet
requirements
There are two approaches to the
hydrodynamic design of pumps. The
direct (or conventional) approach
is based on trial and error changes
to the blade shape. The designer
starts from an initial blade shape
and then evaluates the flow field
in the impeller or diffuser by the
application of a computational
fluid dynamics code (CFD), which
is then modified based on previous
experience (Figure 1). Because of its
reliance on previous experience, this
approach can inherently restrict the
designer to work in a relatively small
part of the design space, which limits
his/her ability to develop innovative
designs quickly.
An alternative approach is the inverse
design method, in which the blade
shape is computed for a specified
distribution of pressure distribution or
blade loading. Such an approach offers
many advantages:
WORLD PUMPS June 2007

Figure 3. Supercompact pump stage design5.
• Flow-related design parameter.
The design parameter is based on
pressure or loading distribution,
which can be based on aerodynamic
principles.
• Design beyond previous experience.
The flow-based design parameter
allows the designer to use his/her
aerodynamics knowledge and
feedback from CFD to arrive at a
design specification that results in
innovative design.
• Database of design know-how. The
design specification has generality
and can be easily used in the
design of similar components.
This can allow the generation of
valuable design know-how that
can be used to generate optimum
designs very quickly even if the
head, flow rates or rpm change for
a given design.
TURBOdesign-1 is based on this
inverse approach, with the advantage
that it uses blade loading together
with thickness distribution as the
design input and hence results in a
robust design method in which the
structural integrity of the designed
blade is ensured. The method starts
with information available from a
basic 1D or mean-line analysis, such
as rpm, mass flow rate, Euler head,
inlet and exit tip diameters and blade
width, which is then used together
with the blade loading distribution to
generate the blade shape (Figure 2).
Further details on this approach for
pump applications can be found in
Reference 1.
WORLD PUMPS June 2007
feature impeller design
Design breakthrough
TURBOdesign-1 has enabled some
important breakthroughs in the design
of pump stage components. For example,
by using this approach in the design of
mixed flow and centrifugal impellers,
it was possible to derive a simple set
of design guidelines for suppression
of secondary flows in these impeller
types2,3. In another application, the
method was used to suppress corner
separation in vaned bowl diffusers of
the type commonly used in mixed flow
pumps4. The method has also been used
to achieve a supercompact design of
mixed flow pumps without significant
reduction in efficiency and suction
performance5, and in suppressing inlet
recirculation or rotating cavitation in
rocket pump inducers6.
In Figure 3 the example of a
supercompact pump stage designed
by TURBOdesign-1 is presented. The
pump stage has been redesigned to
achieve a 61% reduction in volume.
As shown, the stage’s tip radius had to
be reduced substantially to achieve this
aim. As a result, in order to achieve
the same head, the pump stage loading
coefficient (Ψ) had to be almost
doubled from 0.33 to 0.6. Comparing
the resulting normalized measured
efficiency for the compact stage design
(Ns800S) with the conventional
stage performance (Figure 4), one
can see that the new compact stage
performance is very similar to that
of the original conventional stage
despite having only 39% of the
volume. Also shown in Figure 4 is
the performance of the stage with
the same meridional shape as the
conventional stage but redesigned by
TURBOdesign-1 (Ns800C). This stage
was found to have a peak efficiency
that is 5.8 percentage points higher
than the conventional one.
Graphical user interface
In developing TURBOdesign-1,
considerable effort has been spent on
creating a very user-friendly graphical
user interface (GUI) for the code
to further improve the designer’s
productivity. This interface allows a
design case to be built very rapidly from
basic 1D design information. Some
features of the GUI are as follows:
• The meridional shape can be easily
manipulated interactively.
• The thickness distribution can be
constant or specified from a file or
modified interactively.
• The blade loading also can be
modified by using a three-segment
combination of two parabolic
sections and a straight line section
or arbitrarily modified by using B-
splines. The arbitrary modification
by B-splines has been found to be
useful for cavitation control in
pumps.
1.25
Conventional Ns800C
design
Ns800
1.0
Efficiency ratio η*
0.75
Ns800S
0.5
0.25
Efficiency - flow
characteristics
0 0.5 1.0 1.5
Flow rate ratio Q*
Figure 4. Measured normalized performance of the supercompact
stage designed by TURBOdesign-1 (Ns800S) compared with that of the
conventional stage, and of the redesigned stage (Ns800C) with the
same meridional geometry as the conventional stage.
www.worldpumps.com 29
 feature impeller design
• Accurate leading and trailing edges
can be generated with different
elliptic distributions or under and
over filing.
• Accurate surface pressure
distributions can be obtained
that correlate closely with CFD
data. This information can be
used to improve the cavitation
performance of the blade.
• The code allows for detailed
comparison of one or two different
blade geometries in terms of
blade shapes, blade angle, wrap
angle, thickness and curvature
Figure 5. Example of an IGES file brought into a TDCAD module.
Figure 6. Example of a loading distribution on the highlighted streamline as computed by
the Q3D module.
30 www.worldpumps.com
both in streamwise and spanwise
directions.
• Blade geometry export to most
commercially available CFD, CAD
and FEA codes (including export
functionality for FLUENT, CFX,
STAR-CD and CCM+), IGES
surface and point data formats,
as well as STL formats for rapid
prototyping.
In addition to the above,
TURBOdesign has a special script
version that allows very easy
coupling of the code with automatic
optimization algorithms7,8,9.
Version 3.0 suite
The development of TURBOdesign
version 3.0 – scheduled for release
at the end of May 2007 – has been
based on intensive consultation
with customers, who expressed a
requirement for better integration
of the design code into existing
CAE (computer-aided engineering)
systems. Many customers have a large
database of existing pumps defined in
terms of blade geometry and wish to
translate this database with ease into
the TURBOdesign environment.
Another important requirement was
the facility to make simple changes to
the blade geometry once the program
generates the blade shape. This feature
allows designers to meet any possible
manufacturing or other related
geometrical constraints.
In response to these requirements,
detailed planning was undertaken in
order to ensure that the TURBOdesign
software can be fully integrated into
existing CAE systems in a seamless
manner. In order to achieve these
aims, three main components were
developed, as outlined below.
CAD conversion module
This allows the translation of IGES
surface data into native TURBOdesign
point data. This module allows
automatic generation of all the required
TURBOdesign data files from an
existing IGES file.
Q3D analysis module
By using this quasi-3D code, the blade
loading for a given blade geometry can
be computed with ease. This will then
allow the designer to relate better the
features of the optimum blade geometry
to the hydrodynamics of the flow and
derive more general design know-how
from the existing database. Also this
blade loading can then be brought
into TURBOdesign-1 and modified to
improve the hydrodynamic design.
Direct design module
This module will allow for the small
manipulation of the blade shape
computed by TURBOdesign-1 to meet
WORLD PUMPS June 2007

any possible constraints in terms of
manufacturing.
In Figure 5, an example IGES surface
geometry loaded by the TDCAD
module of TURBOdesign version 3.0 is
shown. The converter requires the user
to specify the surface patches that make
up the hub, shroud and blade surfaces.
Once these surfaces are specified
interactively by the user, the point data
is generated automatically, including all
the necessary files to run TURBOdesign
such as the thickness and meridional
geometry file.
The point data can then be read into
the quasi-3D module which, together
with basic design specifications
such as rpm, mass flow rate and inlet
total pressure, is used to compute the
loading distribution on the blade. An
example of a blade geometry converted
to point data and its resulting loading
distribution computed by the quasi-3D
code is shown in Figure 6; the loading
distribution on the highlighted
streamline is shown in the lower left
window.
The loading distribution can then be
read into TURBOdesign-1, where it can
be modified interactively and this can
then be used to compute an improved
blade shape.
Concluding remarks
TURBOdesign enables the designer to
control the flow field in the impeller
and diffuser by careful control of 3D
pressure fields, through the specified
blade loading distribution. Thus, it
is possible to achieve an innovative
design for turbomachinery blades
having, for example, high efficiency,
high suction performance and
very compact machine size. Once
optimum input data, based on solid
physical background, are found for
TURBOdesign, it is possible to apply
these results to similar designs or at
least give a good baseline design to
start an optimization process. This
feature is especially useful for the
systematic series development of
pumps covering a wide range of flow
coefficients (or specific speeds). The
design guidelines or expertise thus
WORLD PUMPS June 2007
feature impeller design
obtained are expected to be more
universal and operator-independent,
and are easily transferred to the next
generation.
The use of TURBOdesign also enables
the optimization of one of the design
parameters while keeping other
parameters the same. The effects
of adopting a different meridional
geometry, for example, can be evaluated
independently while keeping the blade
loading distribution and other design
parameters the same.
In addition to the above features,
TURBOdesign version 3.0 will offer
seamless integration to existing CAE
systems and will allow easy import
of existing design databases into the
TURBOdesign environment.
ADT is currently involved in a
consortium with Engenious Japan in
the development of a design system
where TURBOdesign is coupled with
Design of Experiment, Response Surface
Modelling and Multi-objective Genetic
Algorithms. This methodology, which
will become available in TURBOdesign
next year, will allow rapid development
of new know-how in terms of optimum
blade loading for multi-objective and
multi-point applications. ■ characteristics using 3D inverse
References
[1] M. Zangeneh and A. Goto,
‘TURBOdesign-1: next generation
design software for pumps’, World
Pumps, No. 437, pp. 32-36, (2003).
[2] M. Zangeneh, A. Goto and H.
Harada, ‘On the design criteria
for suppression of secondary
flows in centrifugal and mixed
flow impellers’, Trans ASME, J.
Turbomachinery, Vol. 120, pp. 723-
735, (1998).
[3] M. Zangeneh, A. Goto and H.
Harada, ‘On the Role of Three-
Dimensional Inverse Design
Methods in Turbomachinery Shape
Optimization’, Proc. Instn Mech
Engrs, Vol. 213 Part C, pp. 27-42,
(1999).
[4] A. Goto and M. Zangeneh,
‘Hydrodynamic Design of Pump
Diffuser Using Inverse Design
Method and CFD’, ASME J.
About ADT
Since its foundation in 1998,
London, UK-based Advanced Design
Technology (ADT) has been involved
in the development of advanced
design methods for turbomachinery
applications. ADT was established
after a long period of collaboration
with Ebara Corporation of Japan
and the US Office of Naval Research
in order to validate these design
methodologies experimentally for
pump applications. ADT’s main
objective is the development
of design methodologies that
not only help designers achieve
breakthrough designs but can also
reduce design time for customized
designs and meet the multi-
objective requirements that are
necessary in many pump applications
– such as improvement to suction
performance and efficiency or
reduction in shut-off head or power,
as well as improvements to stall
margin.
Fluids Eng., Vol. 124, pp. 319-328,
(2002).
[5] A. Goto et al., ‘Compact Design
of Diffuser Pumps using Three-
Dimensional Inverse Design
Method’, 3rd ASME/JSME Joint
Fluids Engineering Conference,
ASME paper No. FEDSM99-6847,
(1999).
[6] K. Ashihara et al., ‘Improvements
of inducer inlet backflow
design methods’, AIAA 2002 4158,
(2002).
[7] C. Yiu and M. Zangeneh,
‘Three Dimensional Automatic
Optimisation Method for
Turbomachinery Blade Design’, J.
Propulsion Power, Vol. 16, No. 6,
(2000).
[8] S. Miyauchi, N. Kassai and J.
Fukutumi, ‘Optimization of
meridional shape design of pump
impeller’, 23rd IAHR Symposium,
Yokohama, Japan, (2006).
[9] M. Zangeneh, ‘Conventional design,
inverse design and optimization’,
Turbonews, No. 1, Oct 2004 (www.
adtechnology.co.uk/news) (2004).
CONTACT
M. Zangeneh
Advanced Design Technology Ltd
Monticello House, 45 Russell Square
London WC1B 4JP, UK
Tel: +44-20-7907-4715
Fax: +44-20-7907-4711
E-mail: mzangeneh@adtechnology.co.uk
www.adtechnology.co.uk
www.worldpumps.com 31