Case Study: Riello Burners achieves rapid, energy-efficient fan designs with COMSOL Multiphysics

Riello - Customer Case Study

Riello, an Italian manufacturer of oil and gas burners, faced rising pressure to reduce the large share of system energy consumed by ventilation fans (30–40% in high‑power burners and up to 80% in small units) and to meet EU Directive 125/2009 limits. To cut development time and improve fan efficiency, Riello turned to Comsol, using Comsol Multiphysics with the CFD Module and the frozen rotor method to model the interacting rotating impeller and fixed volute instead of relying solely on slow, prototype‑heavy Pitot‑tube testing.

Using Comsol’s simulations Riello reduced design and testing time from about a year of trial prototypes to roughly a month (with model construction and computations often taking only a few hours), optimized volute shapes for steadier, more laminar flow, and validated results against experiments. Comsol’s approach let Riello achieve measurable energy improvements—for example reducing fan power from 250 W to 200 W would save the equivalent of 0.5 MW annually across a typical 10,000 units/year production run—while enabling smaller motors, lighter burners, and lower noise and vibration.

Riello

Gianluca Argentini

Manager in the R&D Department