At preliminary design stages of the turbine discs design process, reducing uncertainty in the thermal prediction of critical parts models is decisive to bid a competitive technology in the aerospace industry. This paper describes a novel approach to develop adaptive thermal modeling methods for non-gaspath turbine components. The proposed techniques allow automated scaling of disc cavities during preliminary design assessment of turbine architectures. The research undertaken in this work begins with an overview of the past investigations on the flow field in cavities of the air system surrounding the turbine discs. A theoretical approach is followed to identify the impact of the design geometry and operation parameters of a simplistic rotor-stator cavity, with special focus on swirl and windage effects. Then, a parametric CFD process is set up to conduct sensitivity analysis of the flow field properties. The CFD sensitivity analysis confirmed the parameter influences concluded from the theoretical study. The findings from the CFD automated studies are used to enhance the boundary conditions of a thermal FE-model of an actual high pressure turbine. The new set of thermal boundary conditions adapts the flow field to changes in the cavity parameters. It was found that the deviation to experimental data of the traditional preliminary modeling technique is about 4 times higher as the deviation of the CFD-enhanced technique. When running the FE-model through a transient cycle, the results from the CFD-enhanced method are significantly closer to the test data than those from the traditional method, which suggests there is high potential for using these adaptive thermal techniques during turbine preliminary design stages.
High Pressure Turbine Discs of Aero Engines are classified as Critical Parts. Critical Parts are those whose failure is classified as likely to have hazardous or even catastrophic effects (e.g. damage to or loss of aircraft structure, injury/loss of the crew/passengers) and therefore require special control in order to achieve an acceptably low probability of individual failure. Even though special care is taken during the design and manufacturing process of these parts, there are still tolerances within their manufacturing route and during operation. Historically, Aero Engine parts were designed and laid out not to fail by using large safety factors to allow for scatter in different parameters. With the advent of high power computing, the time to conduct detailed thermo-mechanical assessments has drastically reduced and is therefore now open for Probabilistic Analytical Methods to determine the influence of parameter scatter on life and integrity. This paper presents a parametric study of a typical two stage High Pressure Turbine (HPT) disc arrangement with a micro-turbine system, which feeds cooling air into the interstage cavity [1]. A series of automated studies were performed to determine the relevance of parameters, assess their sensitivity and evaluate their combined impact on the targets of the disc design process. The automated workflow couples a chain of programs that perform geometry manipulation, Finite-Element Thermo-Mechanical analysis simulation and life prediction. This process was used to assess parameter variations in the air system, thermal boundary conditions and the geometry of several turbine disc features. The resulting outputs of this study are the percentile impacts and correlations of each parameter on the life expectancy of the turbine discs. This provides a qualitative understanding of the relevance of each parameter when approaching the design of turbine discs.
The rotating components in gas turbines are very highly stressed as a result of the centrifugal and thermal loads. One of the main functions of the secondary air system (SAS) is to ensure that the rotating components are surrounded by air that optimizes disc lifing and integrity. The SAS is also responsible for the blade cooling flow supply, preventing hot gas ingestion from the main annulus into the rotor-stator cavities, and for balancing the net axial load in the thrust bearings. Thus, the SAS design requires a multidisciplinary compromise to provide the above functions, while minimizing the penalty of the secondary flows on engine performance. The phenomenon known as rotor-stator drag or windage is defined as the power of the rotor moment acting on its environment. The power loss due to windage has a direct impact on the performance of the turbine and the overall efficiency of the engine. This paper describes a novel preliminary design approach to calculate the windage of the rotor-stator cavities in the front of a typical aero engine HP turbine. The new method is applied to investigate the impact of the SAS design parameters on the windage losses and on the properties of the cooling flows leading to the main annulus. Initially, a theoretical approach is followed to calculate the power losses of each part of the HPT front air feed system. Then, a 1D-network integral model of the cavities and flow passages of the HPT front is built and enhanced with detailed flow field correlations. The new 1D-flow network model offers higher fidelity regarding local effects. A result comparison between the theoretical calculation and the prediction of the enhanced flow network model puts forward the relevance of the local flow field effects in the design concept of the SAS. Using the enhanced 1D-flow network models, the SAS design parameters are varied to assess their influence on the windage and pumping power calculation. As a conclusion, the paper shows how the SAS design can have a significant influence on the HPT overall power and the air that is fed back into the turbine blade rows. Controlling these features is essential to bid a competitive technology in the aero engine industry.
The design and development process of an aero engine is a complex and time-consuming task that involves many disciplines and company departments with different objectives and requirements. Along the preliminary design phase, multiple concepts are assessed in order to select a competitive technology. The engine design process, which was traditionally subdivided into modular component tasks, is nowadays considered as a multi-disciplinary workflow. Having recognized the need for developing advanced turbine preliminary design tools, this work focuses on enhancing the integration of turbine design disciplines, improving the accuracy of models and speeding the time to generate models. The proposed process facilitates an automated turbine Secondary Air System (SAS) and turbine discs concept definition. Furthermore, the process of CAD models and flow network models generation is accelerated via automation of the engineering workflow. This is accomplished through a novel Java based data model, where the design of turbine discs and SAS features is captured in a programmable framework. In the application section, the preliminary design definition of a reference HP turbine subsystem is replicated using the newly developed common design environment. The automated workflow is then used to generate the corresponding CAD models, recognize the subsystem flow network, and generate the 1D flow network model. The results are then compared to the experimentally validated model of a reference engine. As conclusion, the automated workflow offers a quick and parametric model generation process, while providing a good level of fidelity for the preliminary design phase.
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