Air Foil Bearing Design | Barber-Nichols Customer Success Story

Overview

Barber-Nichols, a custom turbomachinery company, is further enhancing their physics-based modeling capability of later generation air foil bearing behavior using Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

Challenge

Barber-Nichols’ previous air foil bearing design tool was developed for early generations of foil bearings which employed relatively basic, uniform geometries. Although Barber-Nichols has successfully deployed later generation foil bearings in the past, they required the use of a tool that could more quickly predict foil deformation, pressure generation, and film thickness of non-uniform foil geometries. They sought a multiphysics solution that would combine structural and hydrodynamic analyses.

Solution

Barber-Nichols turned to SimuTech Group for assistance, seeking their expertise in advanced simulation software, particularly Ansys. SimuTech’s specialists in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis provided invaluable mentorship and technical support, guiding Barber-Nichols through the setup and execution of their first FSI analysis using Ansys tools. This collaboration allowed Barber-Nichols to leverage SimuTech’s extensive experience and knowledge, effectively combining their independent structural and hydrodynamic analyses into a cohesive FSI model.

The Benefits

1. Efficiency: With SimuTech’s assistance Barber-Nichols was able to increase their efficiency of solve time, they achieved a 4x improvement, showcasing a significant reduction in time and effort.
2. Knowledge Transfer: Mentoring sessions with SimuTech not only provided a solution to the immediate problem but also empowered Barber-Nichols’ engineers with the knowledge and confidence to evaluate other tools and similar analyses for future gains in other technologies.
3. Expertise Utilization: By collaborating with SimuTech, Barber-Nichols could tap into a wealth of expertise, ensuring the project’s success and enhancing their own capabilities in advanced simulation techniques.
4. Seamless Integration: The seamless collaboration between Barber-Nichols and SimuTech led to an efficient and effective solution air foil design, ultimately strengthening their relationship and laying the groundwork for future partnerships.

Barber-Nichols’ collaboration with SimuTech Group and Ansys transformed a complex challenge into a manageable solution, delivering significant time savings, enhanced capabilities, and a successful outcome.