Flow Visualization for Turbomachinery Design

Abstract

Visualization of CFD data for turbomachinery design poses some special requirements which are often not addressed by standard flow visualization systems. We discuss the issues involved with this particular application and its requirements with respect to flow visualization. Aiming at a feature-based visualization for this task, we will examine various existing techniques to locate vortices. The specific flow conditions for turbomachines demonstrate limitations of current methods. Visualization of turbomachinery flow thus raises some challenges and research topics, particularly regarding feature extraction. 1 Introduction Water turbines used in hydroelectric power plants are large machines (typical runner diameter 3-7 m, Fig. 1) manufactured and designed individually for the specific conditions of the installation and requirements of the customer. Today, efficiencies exceed the level of 93%. A thorough introduction to hydraulic machines can be found in [1], a brief overview in [2]. ...