Improvement of Fan Design Using CFD

The market needs for quieter and more compact engine cooling modules have led Valeo to develop a complete simulation based design (SBD) for its future fan technology. Its purpose is not only to improve the performances of the existing range, but also to reduce the design times significantly, and therefore to cut down the development costs.

The current SBD involves using state-of-the-art CFD as a backbone. From an initial guess for a given design point based on a ducted flow approach, 2D blade cascade Navier-Stokes computations are performed to improve and optimize the initial profile. 3D Navier-Stokes computations are then performed to get the final stacking that will match the objective performances. All computations presented here have been achieved with TASCflow by ASC.

Validation calculations and first designs using the SBD are presented here: besides achieving the design conditions with a 15% decrease in axial packaging as targeted, up to 15% improvement in fan efficiency have already been obtained and up to 4 dBA noise reduction have been measured on the new fans.