Aero-Thermodynamic Modelling and Gas Path Simulation for a Twin Spool Turbo Jet Engine

Abstract

The user community of civil and military aircraft powered by gas turbine engines has a significant interest on simulation models for design, development and maintenance activities. These play a crucial role in understanding the aircraft mission performance. The simulation models can be used to understand the behavior of gas turbine engine running at various operating conditions, which are used for studying the aircraft performance and also vital for engine diagnostics. Other significant advantage of simulation model is that it can generate required data at intermediate stages in gas turbine engine, which sometimes cannot be obtained by measurement. Thus engine simulation model / virtual engine building is one of the important aspects towards development of Engine Health Management (EHM) system. This paper describes in detail the engine simulation model development for a typical twin spool turbo jet engine using commercially available Gas turbine Simulation Program (GSP). The engine simulation model has been used for typical aero-engine to get aero-thermodynamic gas path performance analysis related to engine run at Design point, Off Design points and the engine Acceleration-Deceleration Cycles (ADC). Simulations at different operating conditions have been carried out using scaled up characteristic maps of engine components. Design point data as well as engine gas path data obtained from test bed has been used to develop scaled up characteristic maps of the engine components. The simulation results have been compared with various test bed data sets for the purpose of validation. Predicted results of engine parameters like engine mass flow rate and thrust are in good agreement with the test bed data. This validated model can be used to simulate faulty engine components and to develop the fault identification modules and subsequently an EHM system.

Study of Design Modification Effects through Performance Analysis of a Legacy Gas Turbine Engine

“…The methodology followed in this work for off-design simulation is based on the matrix iterative technique detailed in Walsh and Fletcher (2004). This approach of simulation model development has earlier been applied to a single spool engine, as detailed in Sankar et al (2013). This approach accounts for the variation of properties of the gas along the engine by appropriately changing the specific heat.…”

Development and validation of a full-range performance analysis model for a three-spool gas turbine with turbine cooling

“…Kurzke [15], Haglind [8] and Sankar et al [16], as noted above, directly predefined the fractional cooling air flow rate in their performance calculations. Al-Hamdan [6] assumed the amount of cooling air bled from the compressor to be equal to the fuel flow.…”

“…Aguilar [14] used a component-based off-design calculation program GSP to analyze the regulation methods of a combined heat and power plant based on two-spool gas turbines. For the turbojet engine, Kurzke [15] proposed a method to establish an engine performance model from a limited amount of data, and Sankar [16] et al developed an engine simulation model for a twin-spool turbojet engine using GSP and performed an analysis related to an engine run at the design point and at off-design points, as well as the engine acceleration deceleration cycles.…”

On-Design Operation and Performance Characteristic of Custom Engine

“…Meanwhile, engine health monitoring is considered very important during the operation phase [1]. One of the aspects to develop the Engine Health Management (EHM) system is an engine simulation model [2]. There are considerable advantages of simulating the models, such as (i) to understand the performance of the gas turbine engine running on different operation conditions, (ii) to generate required data for a gas turbine engine at an intermediate stage which cannot be acquired analogy [2].…”