Design support for turbomachinery

From the steam turbines which provide most of our electricity to the jet engines which have shrunk our World, turbomachines undoubtedly play a major role in life today. Competition in the turbomachinery industry is fiercely strong [Wisler, 1998], hence good aerodynamic design is vital. However, with efficiency levels already close to their theoretical maxima, companies are increasingly looking to reduce costs and increase reliability through improved design practice. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can make a strong contribution to assisting this process as it has the potential to increase performance while reducing cost. The situation is, however, complicated by an ever decreasing number of engineers with sufficient design experience to reap the full benefits offered by CFD. With the large risks involved, novice designers of today are increasingly confined to refining old designs rather than gaining experience, like their forebears, through 'clean sheet' exercises. Hence it is desirable to capture the knowledge and experience of older designers, before it is lost, to assist the engineers of tomorrow. It is therefore the aim of this project to produce a design support tool which will not only store the appropriate CFD codes, but also provide a dynamic signpost (based on elicited knowledge and experience) to advise the engineer in their use. The signposting methodology developed for the aerospace industry [Clarkson and Hamilton, 1997] will provide the basic framework for the tool. This paper reviews current turbomachinery design practice (including an examination of the relevant CFD) in order to establish the important issues which a support tool must address. Current design support methodologies and their propriety are then reviewed, followed by a detailed description of the signposting concept. It then sets out a clear statement of the objectives for the research and the methods proposed to meet them. The paper concludes with a timetable of the work.

EEFIT mission to Haiti following the 12th January 2010 earthquake

The Mw= 7.2 Haiti earthquake of 12th January 2010 caused extensive damage to buildings and other infrastructure in the epicentral region in and around Port-au-Prince. The Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT), which is based in the United Kingdom, organised a field mission to Haiti with the authors as the team members. The paper presents the geotechnical findings of the team including those relating to soil liquefaction and lateral spreading and discusses the performance of buildings, including historic buildings, and bridges. Unprecedented use was made of damage assessments made from remote images (i. e. images taken from satellites and aircraft) when planning the post-earthquake relief effort in Haiti and a principal objective of the team was to evaluate the accuracy of such assessments. Accordingly, 142 buildings in Port-au-Prince were inspected in the field by the EEFIT team; damage assessments had previously been made using remote images for all these buildings. On the basis of this survey, the tendency of remote assessments to underestimate damage was confirmed; it was found that the underestimate applied to assessments based on oblique images using the relatively new technique of Pictometry, as well as those based on vertical images, although to a lesser degree. The paper also discusses the distribution of damage in Port-au-Prince, which was found to be strongly clustered in ways that appear not to have been completely explained. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.