Red Bull Ford Powertrains is designing and building the new power unit – engine, turbocharger and hybrid system – for the 2026 F1 season, which ushers in a new hybrid engine design and sustainable fuel requirements. While the team now has a working prototype of the 2026 engine, there are many design iterations and further developments yet to come before its descendants hit the track. And with Oracle Red Bull Racing, the defending champion team of the 2023 F1 Championship, there’s only one ultimate measure of success: The top spot on the driver and team rankings.

The acoustic performance of fans is of prime importance to meet customers’ needs. However, acoustics is hard to simulate, and insight is primarily gained via measurements of prototypes. That makes methods for noise estimation at an early design stage very interesting. We show in this contribution how the TD1 acoustic output parameters correlate with measurements.

Greenheck has a diverse product line and often designs fan products and systems using basic turbo-machinery principles and 2D techniques. However, ADT's 3D inverse design method has been used effectively for the past 5 years to develop axial, mixed flow, and centrifugal fans for a variety of HVAC applications. The presentation focuses on how Greenheck was able to achieve high static efficiency in less time, particularly for retrofit and data center applications. The presentation also discusses how Greenheck used ADT to produce customer-centric design choices (cost vs. efficiency) for a single application.

The inverse design technology to control cavitation flow and cavitation aggressiveness will be introduced. By using the technology, loading distribution of a blade under conditions where cavitation occurs can be controlled. The effects of loading distribution and experimental validations will be discussed in the presentation.

The fully three-dimensional inverse design tool TURBOdesign is used in optimization design of the pump-turbine runners in order to satisfy the multiple requirements for the pump-turbines. Some important performances based on the experimental measurements and the numerical simulations are presented.

Widespread adoption of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power calls for supplementary green technologies such as Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS) systems for stabilizing a grid because of the intermittent nature of the former. Traditionally hydro power systems are designed for high head operation and hence the potential installation sites are limited. Low head PHS systems are desirable for flat geographies where high head reservoirs are not possible. Development of such a system for augmenting grid stability is the aim of ALPHEUS project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. To meet the challenges, a shaft driven contra-rotating reversible pump turbine is designed using inverse 3D blade design approach. CFD analysis is performed in both pump and turbine modes of operation to assess the performance across a range of conditions. An optimization is carried out in the model scale using a Design of Experiments approach to maximize the performance.