It has been an honor for Empowering Pumps & Equipment over the years to shine a light on the professionals behind the industries that are vital to life and share their stories with our #PumpTalk Community. We are proud to have Ralph Peter Mueller as our #Pumptalk Celebrity. Ralph is the President of CFTurbo, Inc.
Q: How did you get started working in your field?
Ralph: I’m a Mechanical Engineer by trade. After finishing college in 1990 I worked as a CFD consultant, helping companies solve their fluid flow and heat transfer problems. Above all, I have always been interested in Turbomachinery design and its applications. The logical consequence was starting a software company in Turbomachinery software and engineering services. That has happened in 2008. Together with my co-founder, Gero Kreuzfeld, we established CFturbo GmbH in Dresden, Germany. Meanwhile, I’m running CFturbo, Inc. our subsidiary in the United States.
Q: What do you love the most about your job? What are you most proud of?
Ralph: Being my own boss has been a primary driver in my professional life. I love the independence, the responsibility, the freedom to decide, building a team, and the lifestyle in general. I enjoy attending trade shows and technical conferences, meeting people, and working with clients, business partners, and Academia. All this working in a challenging field of high technology, product development, design exploration, simulation, and optimization. It is genuinely a dream job for me. I’m very proud that we have created a successful, highly respected, international company. With our software CFturbo, a user is enabled to design axial, mixed-flow, and radial pumps, blowers, fans, compressors, gas turbines, and hydro turbines. It is the most user-friendly system on the market, and we follow a path of continuous improvement. It has become our “pursuit of perfection”.
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering this line of work or new to the field?
Ralph: The CFD/FEA software will become increasingly user-friendly, which is nice. If someone wants to enter the field of fluid flow simulation and Turbomachinery design in particular, he or she should have a profound engineering education. It is essential in our business to understand the basics of Physics, like the laws of Thermodynamics, the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, the Bernoulli Equations, the Euler equation of Turbomachinery, etc.
Q: Can you talk about a project you recently worked on?
Ralph: We recently finished a double-suction pump optimization project combining Reverse Engineering of the rotor, conceptual rotor design, automated design exploration, and optimization. Since the baseline reference model of the pump had already a high standard in terms of hydraulic efficiency, we applied high-fidelity transient flow simulation and analysis to validate the new designs. It has been confirmed again that a Turbomachinery optimization process needs high-end CFD. The critical task for companies like ours is to automate the process of conceptual design, simulation, and optimization in a user-friendly manner.
Q: Anything else you would like to add?
Ralph: In Turbomachinery design, various options exist to create new and optimized geometries for Pumps, Blowers, Fans, Compressors, and Turbines. At CFturbo, we think the 3D conceptual design of rotors, stators, and volutes should be as accurate as possible to ensure the coverage of all essential flow phenomena. Therefore, the validation must be driven by high-fidelity CFD solvers. It cannot be based on inviscid flow calculations or even loss-model-based data. AI methods can play an essential role in the future of Turbomachinery design. However, it needs specific and accurate datasets for each configuration.
Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn.
THANK YOU, RALPH! WE LOOK FORWARD TO KEEPING UP WITH YOU THROUGH THE #PUMPTALK COMMUNITY!
