Analysis-driven Design of Fuel Cell Blowers

 

Overview

When the world’s leading developers of hydrogen fuel cell systems need a custom solution for air or hydrogen pumping, they often turn to PADT to provide

a blower. A key to PADT’s success is the integration of simulation into every aspect of the product development process.

The blowers designed by PADT are high-speed rotating machines with custom motors and high-efficiency pump heads. Simulation is used to avoid overheating,fatigue and vibration problems. The technology is leveraged to optimize the configuration for greater system efficiency.

The types of analysis conducted on these systems include:

  Preliminary system aerodynamic design

  Detailed inlet and outlet aerodynamic simulation

  Detailed aerodynamic optimization of rotor geometry

  Motor electromagnetic field optimization

  Motor and system cooling solutions

  System and component vibration

  Rotor high-speed centrifugal stresses

  Rotor dynamics of rotating assembly

  Stress evaluation of all components under internal and external loading

 

 

Testimonial

“As the fuel cell industry matures, the efficiency and robustness of peripheral devices such as blowers must improve. We use the full suite of ANSYS products because they integrate with our CAD directly, are integrated with each other and simulate the full range of problems we encounter. These tools allow us to make analysis an integrated part of our process, which in turn enables us to eliminate a significant amount of testing and redesign and to get to the test bench (and therefore the customer) faster and with fewer redesigns. The most important things to our customers are performance, robustness and schedule. The ANSYS tools play an important role in delivering on all three.”

 

 

Challenge

Develop custom hydrogen and air pumping solutions for stationary and automotive hydrogen fuel cells. When developing such systems, considerable challenges arise,

including:

  Compressed development schedules

  Aggressive efficiency goals

  Harsh operating environment

  Aggressive cost goals

  High rotating speed

  High internal temperatures

 

Solution

  Use ANSYS CFX, BladeGen and other ANSYS tools as part of every aspect of the product development process including conceptual design, detailed design and testing.

  Integrate these tools directly with PADT’s parametric CAD via ANSYS Workbench.

  Leverage automation through scripting and automatic report generation.

 

 

Benefits

  Allows development team to make intelligent design decisions based on accurate and timely simulation results 

  Make decisions and find problems much earlier in the design process

  Obtain aggressive efficiency and robustness goals with less testing

  Save engineering time and overhead cost by having to purchase and learn only one suite of tools

 

Analysis-driven Design of Fuel Cell Blowers.pdf