Axis of rotation for centrifugal compressor

Mattia

Dear all,

I'm Mattia and I'm a PhD student at the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands).

At the moment, I am analysing a radial compressor by means of CFD: I am using GAMBIT 2.3.16 for mesh generation and FLUENT 6.3.26 for simulations.

At first, I am using a single rotating frame, which means that everything is rotating (both inlet and outlet basically, because that compressor does not have any diffuser).

Now, my big concern/doubt is the axis of rotation. In the manual is it said that "For 3D problems - and this is my case -, the axis of rotation is the vector from the Rotation-Axis Origin in the direction of the vector given by your Rotation-Axis Direction inputs". Thus, if I select, for the rotation axis direction x=1 y=0 z=0, it means that the direction of rotation is around x-axis.

Well, if the x-axis is going into the screen (in order to talk easily), this means that the rotation should be clockwise, isn't it?

Anyway, how can I be 100% about the direction of rotation in those terms?

I hope I could express my idea.

Thank you. Kind regards, Mattia.