Turntide Achieves Remarkable Efficiency using ADT’s TURBOdesign Suite in the Design of Electric Vehicle Thermal Management Systems

Turntide Technologies has TURBOdesign Suite to design rotodynamic machines, specifically, pumps and fans. They already have significant experience in both areas, but recently expanded the use of ADT products to include pump volute design, and geometry optimization. They included TURBOdesign Suite training in their induction process for new employees to leverage that increased engineering capacity and expanded the existing team’s capability with supplementary training.

ADT’s invaluable training, on-going technical support and responsiveness has enabled new members of the team to quickly become proficient in the use of TURBOdesign and produce innovative geometries for challenging duty cycles. More experienced users have implemented new tools into their workflows.

Turntide’s new engineers were fully trained and able to confidently navigate the software and troubleshoot issues within a timeframe of 6 to 8 weeks. The comprehensive and expert training increased confidence in using the software and highlighted best practices to improve upon the previous product developments.

In one example, to meet a customer’s request for an urgent response, Turntide produced a clean-sheet design in a week. Confidence in the design’s ability to meet performance requirements was increased with subsequent CFD analysis, proving the initial design over a range of operating conditions. The speed with which ADT’s tools allow new concept creation and analysis perfectly aligns with Turntide’s relentless drive toward increased agility and faster solution development, driven fundamentally by accelerating development cycles with their customer’s organizations.

Using conventional design methods, the machine design and test stages represent a significant proportion of the product design life cycle. The three-dimensional inverse design workflow embodied in TURBOdesign enables a drastic reduction in the duration of that phase, through faster geometry creation and reduced physical test iterations.

Using TURBOdesign’s sophisticated numerical design and analysis method and their in-house knowledge and experience, Turntide can design and evaluate tens of geometry iterations in a day. Critical performance parameters of each design are compared using TURBOdesign’s Project Manager, to select the optimal geometry for the customer’s duty cycle. To date, that final selection has delivered the required performance, with a single prototype build and test validating the fluidic components before progression into high volume series production.

Turntide’s engineers undertook ADT’s two-day training program during which new employees gained a thorough understanding of rotodynamic machine design using the TURBOdesign Suite, and existing users increased their knowledge of other tools within the suite. This was a highly productive learning experience which rapidly equipped Turntide with the necessary knowledge and skills to generate effective designs quickly.

The following software features are those which Turntide found very helpful in their day-to-day operations and were most frequently used:

• Project manager window “a fantastic addition allowing us to quickly compare design iterations”

• Blade loading window “easy to use and effective”

• Meridional Geometry modification “highly intuitive”

• 3D visualization tools “allows us to quickly assess potential manufacturing issues before progressing a design”

The components above allowed Turntide to drastically reduce design cycle time and enabled newly on-boarded engineers to quickly become effective in design generation, learning the bounds of good design with near instantaneous feedback from the software, saving valuable time.