Red Bull Ford Powertrains selects TURBOdesign for Turbocharger Development

RBFPT is a new entity for the F1 Power Unit development and therefore looked at TURBOdesign’s great capability in aerodynamic design for the turbocharger optimization to swiftly and successfully launch the turbocharger development project.
TURBOdesign is the reference tool for high performance turbocharger design and optimization, the unique 3D Inverse Design is well versed to create geometries for all of the compressor and turbine components that are optimized for user specified flow conditions and performance requirements. The nature of the aerodynamic design is that the flow is three-dimensional in nature and therefore only fully 3D design tools can accomplish the best performances in short development times.

RBFPT engineers received support from ADT’s design team to develop and implement a number of integrated workflows linking ADT’s TURBOdesign with RBFPT’s simulation environment.

ADT’s engineering team also provided RBFPT with guidance and support on the best practices for development of high-performance turbochargers, its application to race vehicles and also provided three days of on-site training to make sure all users were up to speed.

In total it took around two weeks to complete the integration work and being productive with the tools and workflows.

TURBOdesign offers numerous advantages in turbomachinery developments, two of the most important are the ability to quickly generate geometries that achieve the required performances with minimal CFD iterations, even for completely new turbocharger conditions and architectures. In addition, a unique aspect of 3D Inverse Design is that the blade loading has higher affinity to aerodynamic performances, therefore it is possible to create very accurate surrogate models which require up to two orders of magnitude less CFD runtime than conventional methods.

All images used in this case study are samples and they are not the actual design of the turbine used in the Power Unit.