Datasheet

Fidelity Fine Turbo Accelerates Turbomachinery Designs

Turbomachinery CFD for fast and accurate simulation of rotating machinery

Cadence Fidelity Fine Turbo is a computational fluid dynamics vertical specifically designed for engineers to optimize the power and efficiency of turbomachinery designs quickly and accurately. Its computational engine combines high-fidelity meshing with advanced numerics, automated design of experiments, and a sophisticated machine learning-driven optimization engine to enable designers to push the performance of rotating machinery to its absolute limits without sacrificing efficiency and staying within design parameters.

Overview

Fidelity Fine Turbo solves the aerodynamics of turbomachinery by relying on high-fidelity meshes and a fully structured solver. Its proprietary meshing technology can mesh both axial and radial machinery while properly handling gaps above and behind the blades. This software has proven capability and reliability for designing compressors, turbochargers, and gas turbines, and its unique NLH technology delivers blade-passing frequency analysis with best-in-class accuracy and speed.

The software contains a complete toolchain for end-to-end turbomachinery CFD, with meshing, solving, postprocessing, and optimization applications all designed and refined over the years specifically for this application. In addition, Fine Turbo can be deployed along with full integration into design tools from our industry partner, Concepts NREC, to enable not just a complete CFD workflow, but full end-to-end design, including meanline and FEA coupling, without leaving the design context.

Streamlines in a modernized compressor design
Fig 1: Streamlines in a modernized compressor design

Benefits

  • Fast, accurate CFD analysis for steady and unsteady flows
  • Improve product power and efficiency via automated DoE and optimization
  • Scriptable for bulk analysis and large-scale computations
  • Maximize productivity via integrated end-to-end workflow with Concepts NREC

 

Cadence’s Turbomachinery CFD solutions are widely used by Kawasaki Heavy Industries to support the design and development of various products such as gas turbines, jet engine compressors, and steam turbines for power generation... Cadence software automatically generates high-quality meshes and provides high-speed throughput flow computation, thanks to Cadence’s innovative technologies, such as the CPU Booster and Non-Linear Harmonics, significantly reducing the design cycle time and cost.
Yusuke SAKAI, Senior Manager, Engine Technology Development Department, Aero Engine Business Division, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd.
Mach number contours on a compressor stage
Fig 2: Mach number contours on a compressor stage

Features

High-quality meshing

The speed and accuracy of a CFD solution depend highly on the mesh. The proprietary Autogrid meshing technology in Fidelity Fine Turbo is a high-quality structured mesh generator specifically for turbomachinery, with a variety of features specifically developed for this application.

Fast, powerful solver

Fidelity Fine Turbo’s coupled, density-based, structured solver delivers solutions in a fraction of the time segregated and unstructured solvers do. For unsteady analysis, its unique nonlinear harmonic method delivers solutions orders of magnitude faster than traditional time-stepping methods and can capture multiple modes accurately. It’s so fast that many users get results on a workstation at speeds other solvers only achieve on HPC systems, and for the really big jobs, the solver is fully parallelized and ready for HPC computation.

Automation

Fidelity Fine Turbo uses a variety of automation technologies to accelerate the workflow. Several features in the Autogrid mesher automate the generation of high-quality meshes, and the companion Fidelity Fine Design3D tool can fully automate the exploration of a design space. And, of course, the entire workflow can be captured in scripts, allowing batch processing of designs in bulk.

Integration

One feature that truly sets Fidelity Fine Turbo apart from the pack is its full integration into Concepts NREC’s 3D blade design program, AxCent. A long collaboration with Concepts has integrated a fully automated CFD setup integrated into AxCent, so a turbomachinery engineer can design, create, simulate, and optimize without leaving the design context or handing off the CFD to a different department.

Optimization

Fidelity Fine Turbo’s companion optimization tool, Fine Design3D, is built around sophisticated AI/ML technology that has been refined and developed around turbomachinery applications. Self-organizing maps empower the designer to ensure the optimum exists in the proposed design space, and the multi-target, constrained optimization engine finds the target quickly without the need for user intervention.