Strategic Designing and Optimization of Mixed Flow Impeller Blades for Maritime Applications

Abstract

Mixed flow impellers are extensively used in turbomachines either to convert mechanical energy to fluid energy or to convert fluid energy to mechanical energy. According to the geometry of flow passage, turbo machines can be classified as radial, axial and mixed flow. Mixed flow turbomachines are widely used for engineering applications like cooling water duties, water intake impellers for maritime applications, flood water draining, irrigation and other application fields. The design of mixed flow impellers of high specific speed is a direct extension of the well-established methods of the designing of radial flow impellers but the introduction of near diagonal flow layout at a still larger specific speed stimulated the incorporation of axial impeller design techniques in mixed flow impeller technology. Here, an attempt has been made to design a mixed flow turbo machine blade from the basic principle of turbomachinery and fluid mechanics. On the basis of stress analysis, the blade positioning in the meridional annulus was selected and validated using artificial neural network.