The Shape of Turbomachines and the Ongoing Role of Specific Speed 1 2 3 Paul Gostelow *, Aldo Rona , Ali Mahallati Abstract A wide-ranging taxonomy of turbomachinery types is given. The requirements of steam turbines and aircraft engines established a traditional approach to aerodynamic design analyzing orthogonal planes. Computers facilitated this and led to a greater reliance on Computational Fluid Dynamics, offering exciting developments in three dimensional modeling. A balance should be sought between analytical, computational and experimental work. In work on an axial flow pump rig photographic investigations of cavitation over the ISROMAC 2016 rotor tip have given insights including the very abrupt collapse of cavitation bubbles. Although essential for supersonic regions blade sweep can also be used effectively at lower speeds International Symposium on and can provide significant performance improvements. Further integration of the design and Transport research communities should lead to an improved understanding and predictability. One Phenomena and such area is the unexpected appearance of streamwise vortices on blade suction surfaces. Dynamics of This provides a good base for understanding blade sweep and its effects. Rotating Machinery Keywords Hawaii, Honolulu Shape — Taxonomy — Cavitation — Sweep April 10-15, 2016 1,2 Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom 3 Concepts NREC, White River Junction, Vermont, U.S.A. * Corresponding author:
[email protected] INTRODUCTION turbo – turbinis (L) __ I spin A taxonomy of turbomachines is presented in Fig. 2. Turbomachinery design is a broad field with distant This permits turbomachines of widely varying geometry historical credentials. Figure 1 shows a 2000 year old to be identified, classified and designed.