Frank W. Huber

A Study of the Effects of Tip Clearance in a Supersonic Turbine

Flow unsteadiness is a major factor in turbine performance and durability. This is especially true if the turbine is a high work design, compact, transonic, supersonic, counterrotating, or uses a dense drive gas. The vast majority of modern rocket turbine designs fall into these categories. In this study a parallelized unsteady three-dimensional Navier-Stokes analysis has been used to study the effects of tip clearance on the transient and time-averaged flow fields in a supersonic turbine. The predicted results indicate improved performance in the simulation including tip clearance. The main sources of the performance gains were: (1) a weakened shock system in the case with tip clearance, and (2) the fact that the reductions in the shock losses were greater than the losses introduced by tip clearance.

Detailed Aerodynamic Design Optimization of an RLV Turbine

A task was developed at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) to improve turbine aerodynamic performance through the application of advanced design and analysis tools. There are four major objectives of this task: 1) to develop, enhance, and integrate advanced turbine aerodynamic design and analysis tools; 2) to develop the methodology for application of the analytical techniques; 3) to demonstrate the benefits of the advanced turbine design procedure through its application to a relevant turbine design point; and 4) to verify the optimized design and analysis with testing. The turbine chosen on which to demonstrate the procedure was a supersonic design suitable for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV). The hot gas path and blading were redesigned to obtain an increased efficiency over the baseline. Both preliminary and detailed designs were considered. The subject of the current paper is the optimization of the blading. To generate an optimum detailed design, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), response surface Copyright 2001 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. No copyright is asserted in the United States under Title 17, U.S. Code. The U.S. Government has a royalty-free liscense to exercise all rights under the copyright claimed herein for Governmental Purposes. All other rights are reserved by thecopyright owner methodology (RSM), and neural nets (NN) were used. The goal of the demonstration was to increase the total-tostatic efficiency, tit-s, of the turbine by eight points over the baseline design. The predicted rv-s of the optimized design was 10 points higher than the baseline.

Advancement of Turbine Aerodynamic Design Techniques

The Consortium for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Application in Propulsion Technology has been created at NASA/MSFC. Its purpose is to advance the state-of-the-art of CFD technology, to validate CFD codes and models, and to demonstrate the benefits attainable through the application of CFD in component design. Three teams are currently active within the Consortium: (1) the Turbine Technology Team, (2) the Pump Stage Technology Team, and (3) the Combustion Devices Technology Team. The goals, dynamics, and activities of the Turbine Team are the subjects of this paper.The Consortium is managed by NASA. The Turbine Team is co-coordinated by a NASA representative from the CFD area and an industry (Pratt & Whitney) representative from the area of turbine aerodynamic design. Membership of the Turbine Team includes experts in design, analysis, and testing from the government, industry, and academia. Each member brings a unique perspective, expertise, and experience to bear on the team’s goals of improving turbine efficiency and robustness while reducing the amount of developmental testing. To this end, an advanced turbine concept has been developed within the team using CFD as an integral part of the design process. This concept employs unconventionally high turning blades and is predicted to provide cost and performance benefits over traditional designs. This concept will be tested in the MSFC Turbine Airflow Facility to verify the design and to provide a unique set of data for CFD code validation. Currently, the team is developing and analyzing methods to reduce secondary and tip losses to further enhance turbine efficiency. The team has also targeted volute development as an area that could benefit from detailed CFD analysis.Copyright

Radial Turbine Preliminary Aerodynamic Design Optimization for Expander Cycle Liquid Rocket Engine

†† ‡‡ , A response surface-based dual-objective design optimization was conducted in the preliminary design of a compact radial turbine for an expander cycle rocket engine. The optimization objective was to increase the efficiency of the turbine while maintaining low turbine weight. Polynomial response surface approximations were used as surrogates, and the accuracies of such approximations improve by limiting the size of the domain and the number of variables for each response of interest. The optimization was accomplished in three stages using an approximate, one-dimensional model. In the first stage, a relatively small number of points were used to identify approximate constraint boundaries of the feasible domain and to reduce the number of variables used to approximate each one of the constraints. In the second stage, a moderate number of points in this approximate feasible domain were used to identify the region where both objectives had reasonable values. The last stage focused on obtaining high accuracy approximation in the region of interest with large number of points. The approximations were used to identify the Pareto front and to perform a global sensitivity analysis. Significant improvement was achieved compared to a baseline design.

Unsteady Flow in a Supersonic Turbine with Variable Specific Heats

Modern high-work turbines can be compact, transonic, supersonic, counter-rotating, or use a dense drive gas. The vast majority of modern rocket turbine designs fall into these Categories. These turbines usually have large temperature variations across a given stage, and are characterized by large amounts of flow unsteadiness. The flow unsteadiness can have a major impact on the turbine performance and durability. For example, the Space Transportation Main Engine (STME) fuel turbine, a high work, transonic design, was found to have an unsteady inter-row shock which reduced efficiency by 2 points and increased dynamic loading by 24 percent. The Revolutionary Reusable Technology Turbopump (RRTT), which uses full flow oxygen for its drive gas, was found to shed vortices with such energy as to raise serious blade durability concerns. In both cases, the sources of the problems were uncovered (before turbopump testing) with the application of validated, unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to the designs. In the case of the RRTT and the Alternate Turbopump Development (ATD) turbines, the unsteady CFD codes have been used not just to identify problems, but to guide designs which mitigate problems due to unsteadiness. Using unsteady flow analyses as a part of the design process has led to turbine designs with higher performance (which affects temperature and mass flow rate) and fewer dynamics problems. One of the many assumptions made during the design and analysis of supersonic turbine stages is that the values of the specific heats are constant. In some analyses the value is based on an average of the expected upstream and downstream temperatures. In stages where the temperature can vary by 300 to 500 K, however, the assumption of constant fluid properties may lead to erroneous performance and durability predictions. In this study the suitability of assuming constant specific heats has been investigated by performing three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Stokes simulations for a supersonic turbine stage.

Effects of Endwall Geometry and Stacking on Two-Stage Supersonic Turbine Performance

The drive towards high-work turbines has led to designs which can be compact, transonic, supersonic, counter rotating, or use a dense drive gas. These aggressive designs can lead to strong secondary flows and airfoil flow separation. In many cases the secondary and separated flows can be minimized by contouring the hub/shroud endwalls and/or modifying the airfoil stacking. In this study, three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Stokes simulations were performed to study three different endwall shapes between the first-stage vanes and rotors, as well as two different stackings for the first-stage vanes. The predicted results indicate that changing the stacking of the first-stage vanes can significantly impact endwall separation (and turbine performance) in regions where the endwall profile changes.

Pre- and Post-Test Predictions of the Flow in a Multi-Stage Supersonic Turbine

In order to mitigate the risk of rocket engine development, accurate analysis of turbomachiner y components is required. As part of a program at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center to improve analytical tools, a two -stage supersonic turbine was recently designed, optimized, analyzed and tested in air. One-, two - and three-dimensional computational analyses were used at all stages of the design and analysis process. This paper compares pre- and posttest flow predictions with the experimental data obtained in a cold-flow test facility. The predicted results show excellent agreement with the experimental data. NOMENCLATURE

Design and Analysis of a Turbopump for a Conceptual Expander Cycle Upper-Stage Engine

As part of the development of technologies for rocket engines that will power spacecraft to the Moon and Mars, a program was initiated to develop a conceptual upper stage engine with wide flow range capability. The resulting expander cycle engine design employs a radial turbine to allow higher pump speeds and efficiencies. In this paper, the design and analysis of the pump section of the engine are discussed. One-dimensional meanline analyses and three-dimensional unsteady computational fluid dynamics simulations were performed for the pump stage. Configurations with both vaneless and vaned diffusers were investigated. Both the meanline analysis and computational predictions show that the pump will meet the performance objectives. Additional details describing the development of a water flow facility test are also presented.Copyright

Off-Design Performance of a Multi-Stage Supersonic Turbine

The drive towards high-work turbines has led to designs which can be compact, transonic, supersonic, counter rotating, or use a dense drive gas. These aggressive designs can lead to strong unsteady secondary flows and flow separation. The amplitude and extent of these unsteady flow phenomena can be amplified at off-design operating conditions. Pre-test off-design predictions have been performed for a new two-stage supersonic turbine design that is currently being tested in air. The simulations were performed using a three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Stokes analysis, and the predicted results have been compared with solutions from a validated meanline analysis.

Experimental Performance Evaluation of a Supersonic Turbine for Rocket Engine Applications

In order to mitigate the risk of rocket propulsion development, efficient, accurate, detailed fluid dynamics analysis and testing of the turbomachinery is necessary. To support this requirement, a task was developed at NASNMarshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) to improve turbine aerodynamic performance through the application of advanced design and analysis tools. These tools were applied to optimize a supersonic turbine design suitable for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV). The hot gas path and blading were redesigned-to obtain an increased efficiency. The goal of the demonstration was to increase the total-tostatic efficiency, qt-,, of the turbine by eight points over the baseline design. A sub-scale, cold flow test article modeling the final optimized turbine was designed, manufactured, and tested in air at MSFC’s Turbine Airflow Facility. Extensive on- and offdesign point performance data, steady-state data, and unsteady blade loading data were collected during testing. The predicted qt-. of the optimized design was 10.5 points higher than the baseline. Experimental results show that the goals of the TPO program have been met, by providing a detailed supersonic turbine dataset suitable for analytical code validation and showing a measured qt., increase of 9 points over the baseline efficiency at design conditions.