Matteo Pellegri

Gear pumps and motors are the most common hydrostatic units in the fluid power industries thanks to their high efficiency, low cost, and undisputed reliability. Even if the working concept is fairly simple, the design of
these machines is definitely not trivial as it involves concepts of applied mechanics (gear design), fluid mechanics (fluid displacing action realized by the unit) and tribology (evaluation of the internal leakages and viscous losses). The Maha Fluid Power Research Center of Purdue University (USA) has been working on advanced multi-domain simulation models comprising kinematic, mechanical and fluid dynamic aspects which permits in-depth studies of the operation of gear machines for different operating conditions and working fluids. However, the complexity of such simulation approach along with the unlimited number of possible gear profile geometries makes difficult to use these models for virtual prototyping, without proper optimization tools. This presentation will show the optimization strategies that the research team at Purdue has used to formulate new designs for gear pumps and motors. Thanks to the capabilities of modeFRONTIER, the researchers were able to interface their in-house simulation tools as well as commercial software to perform design optimizations of various cases. This presentation will particularly cover significant optimization studies recently performed at Purdue such as the case of determining the optimal porting grooves of Gerotor and External Gear units and a two-levels optimization of Helical Gear pumps.