80/20 Engineering Case Study with Amarinth – www.amarinth.com
Amarinth is a carbon net zero organization delivering world-leading expertise in the design, application and manufacture of centrifugal pumps and associated equipment for critical applications in many of the most arduous and hostile environments around the globe.
The company has harnessed the skills, creativity and passion of people who have worked in the pump industry for decades, delivering bespoke API and ISO pumps primarily to the offshore and onshore oil & gas industries; nuclear and renewable energy generation; defence; desalination; process and industrial markets.
Amarinth’s innovative approach, business agility and use of sophisticated computer applications enables it to deliver bespoke, robust, reliable and sustainable pumping solutions on the shortest lead times in the industry. Pumps are often manufactured in exotic alloys and to the highest international industry standards, including API 610 and ISO 5199.
Amarinth is at the forefront of bespoke centrifugal pump design, delivering solutions for some of the world’s most challenging pump projects. This includes low-shear applications where poor design can result in catastrophic cavitation; extremely corrosive and abrasive fluids that can cause premature wear and failure of components; through to highly toxic chemicals that would cause significant damage the environment if they were to escape. The company’s pumps frequently operate in some of the most arduous onshore or offshore locations on the planet.
In meeting these challenges, Amarinth pursues innovative methods of design, particularly of impellers and other wetted components, that significantly increase pump reliability and efficiency, thereby benefiting its customers through significant savings in lifecycle running costs and reduced carbon footprints.
To support these demanding requirements, Amarinth’s engineering teams need agile design software that can fit with and support their iterative design methodologies to produce equipment that meets or exceeds stringent customer specifications. To deliver products within a specified budget requires software that can help reduce the number of physical prototypes that are required, shorten product development lead-times and lower development costs, all whilst delivering the industry’s most robust high-quality pumps.
Amarinth started using CFturbo as part of its design suite in 2012 having previously used Concepts NREC. The company selected CFturbo turbomachinery design, simulation, and optimization software over various competitive solutions for its added potential to design the pump casings in addition to the impellers, volutes and stators, a feature that was lacking for example in ANSYS BladeGen, which was also considered at the time.
The Amarinth design process employs CFturbo as the primary 3D modelling tool to produce the pump’s vane geometry, using the software for both single and double entry pumps.
The typical design process begins with a proposed 2D profile being imported into CFturbo, based on Amarinth’s many years of experience of pump design. CFturbo is then used interactively to create the blade’s initial meridional profile and with additional inputs of flow, head and speed the impeller form is completed in 3D (Figure 1). CFturbo helps the user step through the various design stages so that all the functional design requirements can be checked such as inlet area between vanes, blade angle distribution and meridional area progression.
Figure 1 – CFturbo Impeller 3D model Figure 2 – ANSYS CFX Meridional passage streamlines
The industries which Amarinth supply have stringent performance requirements, including low NPSH, stable curves and capable of operating as low shear. As a result, an initial CFD analysis is done on a single blade passage (Figure 2 & 3). The CFturbo Workbench plugin is then used to output the vane geometry for simulation in CFX which quickly produces an optimised structured mesh in TurboGrid. Parametric models for Turbogrid are set-up in CFturbo so that an array of impeller variations can be run efficiently allowing the best option to be selected saving further man time.


Figure 3 – ANSYS CFX Single passage streamlines Figure 4 – Solidworks 3D Impeller model
The resulting profiles and 3D vane are imported into SolidWorks and combined with the hub and shroud profile to form a complete impeller (Figure 4). Utilizing one of Amarinth’s existing casing designs a full 3D CFD analysis can then be performed on the complete pump before commitment to manufacturing. More recently Amarinth have started to utilize CFturbo’s volute design capability to look at producing new casing designs. Initially we have found the tool effective in providing basic geometry. In the future we are looking to use the CFturbo to Workbench plugin for CFD of the entire pump fluid domain (Figure 5).
CFturbo has become an integral part of the Amarinth design suite and enabled the company to continue delivering ever more innovative and cost-effective solutions to many of the world’s leading companies.

Figure 5 – CFturbo Impeller & Casing 3D model