Efficient energy recovery is a key goal for today's engines. Imperial is a world leader in advanced and future turbocharger technologies and that expertise is now easily accessible through the turbine testing facilities. Imperial's unique turbine testing facilities provide steady and unsteady performance testing, with consulting services also offering custom analysis and design.

Unique facilities with wider test range

Using a state-of-the-art eddy dynamometer designed and developed at Imperial, the facility has a much wider test range than if the loading device was a traditional compressor. This wider test range covers power consumption from 1.7 kW to more than 60 kW at full speed. The turbine maps that can be obtained typically cover a range almost five times the width of standard maps, with a velocity ratio ranging from 0.3 to 1.1.

Turbine design

The team at Imperial College is constantly involved in the design and the development of new turbine technologies. The long expertise gained over the years together with the high standard of research carried out on radial/mixed flow turbines makes our group able to fulfil the demand of novel concept turbines. The design process goes from simple meanline analysis to full 3D CAD solid modelling including FEA analysis, prototyping, testing and CFD analysis of the newly designed turbine.

Computational Modelling

 We have a number of researchers who are experts in unsteady 1-D computational modelling and 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling. Our in-house developed 1-D computer code ONDAS predicts the unsteadiness effect of the turbocharger-engine performance.

 The focus of the 3D computational work, using commercially available CFD software and the Imperial College high performance computing (HPC) facility, is to predict the three-dimensional structures of the internal and external fluid flow field in a turbocharger. Our team are also experienced in various software modelling packages including Star-CD, CFX and Ricardo WAVE.