Infrastructure
Test Rigs
The Institute for Power Plant Technology, Steam and Gas Turbines operates a wide range of different test rigs for the investigation of flow and heat transfer phenomena in turbomachines. An additional high-pressure combustion chamber test rig is used to investigate different combustion chambers and their emissions.
| 1.5-stage Air-Axial-Turbine "MIGH" |
| Construction of a single-stage Air Test Turbine "MONA" |
| High pressure combustor test rig |
High Performance Computing
Besides experimental investigations, numerical simulations are another major tool for the analysis of flow phenomena and aero-thermomechanical processes in steam and gas turbines.
Disadvantageously, complex numerical models demand tremendous processing power. The Institute of Power Plant Technology, Steam and Gas Turbines (IKDG) therefore utilizes processing capacities of the RWTH IT Center, which operates one of the fastest supercomputers in Germany. Combined with available software packages like ANSYS CFX and ANSYS Fluent, which are widley used in the industry as well, this opens up the opportunity to investigate realistic turbomachinery models. Even after greatly simplifying such geometries, cell counts often are in the double digit million range. Making use of the computing cluster, calculation times nevertheless are often only a few days.