Case Study: Designcraft achieves a 30% reduction in turbine size while maintaining effectiveness with SimScale

Designcraft reduced its turbine size by 30% while maintaining the same effectiveness

Designcraft, led by founder Trond Gudmundsen, is a Norwegian consultancy working on metal construction and product development; they were tasked with virtually validating and improving the Pilot Turbine design for DeepRiver AS to complement full-scale physical tests. The challenge was to better understand pressure distribution, flow behavior and turbulence in the turbine so design changes could be finalized without costly hardware iterations, so Designcraft turned to SimScale’s cloud-based CFD simulation platform.

Using SimScale’s numerical analysis tools, Designcraft ran iterative CFD simulations that matched physical tests and guided a streamlined redesign. The result: a turbine 30% smaller (with nearly half the blades and reduced diameter) that maintained the same effectiveness, while leveraging up to 150 computing hours in just two days, cutting real wall-clock processing to 1.5 hours (48 compute hours on 32 cores), and avoiding roughly $40k in hardware costs compared with on-premise alternatives.

Designcraft

Trond Gudmundsen

Founder