DMW Corporation is a prominent Japanese industrial manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo since 1910. The company has grown into a specialized leader in the production of high-capacity pumps and blowers. DMW dominates markets in critical infrastructure sectors, serving as a primary supplier for Japan’s public water, sewage, and agricultural drainage systems. They also have significant presence in large-scale international projects in the Middle East and Asia, leveraging its specialized engineering expertise in high-pressure turbomachinery for power plants, oil refineries, seawater desalination and energy recovery systems.
Advanced Design Technology partnered with DMW on a consultancy project to improve the efficiency of a high-pressure multistage pump. The application is for a Desalination Plant using the reverse osmosis membrane process. DMW offers, as part of its product lineup, an Energy Recovery Device that recovers surplus energy generated during this process (known as DeROs), and the pump is used in conjunction with this system.
Advanced Design Technology provide tools to create even the most complex turbomachine stages from scratch. The meanline and sizing code - TURBOdesign Pre - can instantly create the meridional outline for multi-stage pumps including vaned diffusers, return channels and volutes, based on just a few operating parameters - with a much individual stage detail as required for the user to control the specifications of the machine as they need. This allowed engineers to rapidly size the required DMW pump with confidence that the resulting design will meet the basic performance specs.
Fig 1: The multi-stage pump at the heart of the DeROs desalination system
To create 3-dimensional blades the project utilised Advanced Design Technology’s unique flagship product - TURBOdesign1 - this 3D Inverse solver and design project manager leads the engineer through the process of creating paradigm shifting blade geometries based on taking control of the flow field within the blade passage and the creating a blade shape that delivers that flow field. This is a fundamental difference from ‘traditional, direct’ design and eliminates the old trial-and-error methods of ‘change blade shape, assess blade performance, repeat until target performance reached’. With 3D inverse design the target performance is the input, and the blade shape that delivers that performance is the output of the solver. Moreover individual stage components are intrinsically linked and matched to the specified flow field of the adjacent upstream and downstream components, meaning that the entire multi-stage is considered as a single interconnected system.
The consultancy involved creating a fully parameterised model of the blading and meridional outline of the impeller, diffuser and return channel. Due to the power of 3D Inverse Design this parameterization required less than 40 parameters to capture and control the full 3-dimensional complexity of the complete pump stage. With such a compact design space it was easy to rapidly evaluate sensitive parameters and leverage the most effective combinations into an improved stage design. This optimization includes multi-point performance, so that the final design is robust across all operating conditions and not just ‘tightly’ optimised to exploit one operating point - which is a common shortcoming of optimization processes that do not take account of multi-point conditions.
Fig 2: Fig 2: An example multi-stage pump meanline, including vaned diffusers and return channels, created in TURBOdesign Pre
- note this example not representative of the DMW solution
Following the success of the consultancy, DMW moved forward with implementing TURBOdesign Suite within their own pump design system. After a short training period of around a week, DMW engineers were able to start creating pump options that showed marked performance improvements over their current portfolio designs. Significantly, it was felt that such improvements would not be achievable with the legacy design methods and tools that DMW had employed up until then. The engineers at DMW greatly appreciated the templated and standardised methods that are packaged as part of TURBOdesign Suite - this approach significantly reduced the amount of variation in results that is often the consequence of several different engineers applying their own ‘best-practice’. They also noted the TURBOdesign Suite makes it extremely easy to navigate through the turbomachinery design space, connecting to their existing analysis systems via ANSYS Workbench and generating automated post-processing reports, which is a much simpler task than with other packages.
Fig 3: The DeROs desalination system full installation
DMW’s MT-RD pumps, designed using TURBOdesign Suite, achieve the world’s highest level of pump efficiency.
