NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF A CENTRIFUGAL COMPRESSOR FOR SUPERCRITICAL CO2 CYCLES

In this work, the performance characteristics and the flow field of a centrifugal compressor operating with supercritical CO2 are investigated by means of three-dimensional CFD. The considered geometry is based on main dimensions of the centrifugal compressor installed in the supercritical CO2 compression test-loop operated by Sandia National Laboratories. All numerical simulations are performed with a recently developed in-house hybrid CPU/GPU compressible CFD solver. Thermodynamic properties are computed through an efficient and accurate tabulation technique, the Spline-Based Table Look-Up Method (SBTL), particularly optimised for the applied density-based solution procedure. Numerical results are compared with available experimental data and accuracy as well as potentials in computational speedup of the solution method in combination with the SBTL are evaluated in the context of supercritical CO2 turbomachinery.