AeroSol · compressor aerodynamic design
As accurate as it gets
before the first mesh.
A working solver for centrifugal compressors — sizing, blade, throughflow, blade-to-blade, off-design map, volute and stress, all on one geometry. Practical enough to use every day, accurate enough that CFD only ever meshes what deserves it.
The classical method,
rewritten as one solver.
Preliminary design used to mean a sizing spreadsheet, a blade generator, a throughflow code someone wrote in 1994, and a week of carrying files between them — with nobody able to say which tool the disagreement came from. AeroSol is that whole chain rebuilt as a single solver, from the equations up. One geometry, every module reading it, and results you can check against machines other people measured. It is a real product, not a demo — and because it is one program instead of five, an agent can drive the entire loop and hand you a hundred design passes where the old way gave you one.
AI-driven agentic workflow
Four agents, one loop,
and nobody waiting on you.
You do not drive AeroSol module by module. You state what the machine has to do, and a project manager puts three specialist agents on it — intent, design, verification — with a fourth agent watching all three. When the verification does not hold, it is not patched. It goes back to the beginning and the whole chain runs again.
Project manager
Holds the brief and decides what finished means. It dispatches the three specialists, reads what comes back, and refuses a design that does not meet the duty it was given.
Intent & inputs
Reads what you are trying to build, not just the numbers you typed. Duty, working fluid, speed limit, envelope and the constraints you would have argued about anyway become a bounded, solvable set of inputs.
Design & exploration
Runs the preliminary design, then sweeps the design space and refines until the ranking stops moving. Takes the winner off-design and builds its performance map — surge wall, choke wall, efficiency islands.
Verification
Puts the chosen geometry through the throughflow solver for the first real performance numbers, then the 3-D solver for Mach, pressure and loading across span and along the meridional sections.
Optimisation agent
The one that closes the loop. It is in conversation with all three. When Agent 03's throughflow or 3-D field does not meet the brief, it does not patch the blade and move on — it goes back to Agent 01, changes the inputs, and runs the whole chain again.
Every pass is a complete machine — not a lookup, not a surrogate. That is why the loop can afford to reject one and start over, and why a day's work now looks like ten times the design passes an engineer gets through by hand.
Design space
Every dot is a machine
that was actually solved.
The agents do not guess where the good designs are. They go and find out — then come back and search harder where the answers were good. What you see is the shape of your own design space, and the one point in it worth building.
Monte-Carlo search over work and flow coefficient, coloured by efficiency. Red diamond: the best design found.
One geometry, every view
Nothing is re-drawn
between steps.
The blade you shape is the blade the throughflow solver sees, the blade the 3-D field is painted on, and the blade the stress model pulls. Change one control point and the whole chain moves with it.
One operating point, fully solved.
Pressure ratio, efficiency, power and tip speed, with specific speed, head and flow coefficient beside them — and the same machine reported in both the AeroSol and the ANSYS Vista CCD convention, so it can be put next to whatever your team already uses. Underneath, the flowpath those numbers came from, every radius and blade angle on the drawing.
Shape it like a blade, not like a spreadsheet.
Meridional contour, blade-to-blade wrap, angle and thickness distributions — four synchronised views with draggable control points. Drag one, and the blade beside it re-forms: every solver downstream is already reading the new shape.
The passage, resolved hub to shroud.
The meridional grid on the left is the passage the solver was handed — hub and shroud stations, the rotor region, the leading- and trailing-edge normals. The field on the right is what came back: a streamline-curvature solve with radial equilibrium, showing where the flow accelerates and where the inducer is about to run out of margin.
The flow field
Hub to shroud,
in one drag.
The passage surface is not a picture. It is the solution, post-processed at whatever span you point at — so the loading you argue about is the loading the solver actually produced.
Read the map
Where the machine lives,
and where it stops.
Pick a point on the map
Every boundary on this chart was computed from the same geometry the agents produced — nothing here was drawn by hand.
Structural
Find out it will not hold
while you can still change it.
The blade the aero design produced is the blade the stress model pulls — its shape, its thickness distribution, its splitter placement, all of it. Pick a material, and the von Mises field, the root stress and the safety factor come back in the same session. Thin the trailing edge, take some twist out, and watch every one of them move.
Change the alloy and the whole panel re-reads. The tool tells you when a design is marginal rather than letting you find out later — and it is beam theory for screening and Campbell maps, not a finite-element run, which the tool also says out loud.
Accuracy
As close to the truth
as you can get before you mesh.
AeroSol is not a faster CFD. It is the thing that makes CFD worth running — and it earns that by being checkable, by agreeing with itself, and by saying so when it is not sure.
Three solvers, one geometry
Mean-line, streamline-curvature throughflow and a stacked quasi-3D field all run on the identical blade. Where they agree, you can move. Where they part company, you have found the thing to mesh.
Empiricism you can argue with
Slip, diffusion, blade loading, clearance, disc friction, boundary layers — every correlation is the published one, named in the tool, in a single catalogue with each coefficient marked as literature, calibrated, numerical or geometric.
Checked against machines other people measured
The regression suite runs open benchmark impellers and a published transonic stage on every build, and the real-gas model is checked against reference equations of state. The reports ship with the tool.
Worked example — NASA CC3
One machine, entered as built,
against its own measured speed line.
CC3 is NASA's 4:1 transonic centrifugal compressor. Its geometry and its measured performance are both published, which makes it one of the few machines anyone can check a solver against. It was entered into AeroSol as built — the vaneless-diffuser version — and its design speed line was run through every solver in the chain, with nothing tuned to the answer afterwards.
The shape comes out first
All three follow the measured characteristic: pressure ratio rolling off toward choke, efficiency peaking and falling away on either side of it. Getting that shape out of geometry alone, with no map to interpolate, is the part that is actually hard.
The level is not closed
Through the working range every solver reads high on pressure ratio, converging onto the data toward choke. On efficiency both the mean-line and the throughflow sit above the measurement. That gap is real, it is visible on the chart, and the tool does not smooth it away.
Nothing was fitted to this
The coordinates were read out of NASA CR-204134 and checked by twelve independent geometry tests. The measured line was recovered from the report figure's own vector content rather than digitised by eye. No coefficient was moved to improve the match.
The quasi-3D solver appears in the pressure-ratio chart only. It is inviscid, so its isentropic efficiency is identically 1.000 — a number the tool declines to report, because it would tell you nothing here. Both charts are the validation script's own output; the site restyles them to its palette and removes that one meaningless curve. No measured or predicted point has been touched.
And what it is not
- Not CFD. It is inviscid where it says inviscid, and the quasi-3D field is diagnostic-grade — there to show you the loading, not to certify it.
- The structural module is beam theory for screening and Campbell maps, not a finite-element stress analysis, and it is labelled that way in the tool.
- Calibration rests on a small number of measured machines. Where the tool is extrapolating, it says so rather than smoothing over it.
- It is a pre-CFD tool. It exists so that the CFD you do run is spent on candidates that deserve it.
This block is here on purpose. A tool that will not tell you its limits has not told you anything.
How it ships
A desktop application.
Nothing leaves your machine.
Windows, macOS and Linux. No licence server, no upload, no cloud queue. Your geometry stays yours — and when a design is ready it leaves as STEP surfaces and BladeGen/TurboGrid-compatible curves, straight into the mesher you already use.
Pilot study
Half an hour.
Your duty point, live.
A pilot study is a thirty-minute session with your team. You bring a machine you are actually trying to design; we take it through AeroSol in front of you — sizing, blade, map, stress — and you keep whatever comes out of it. No slide deck, and no obligation at the end of it.