Jesuino Takachi Tomita

Gas Turbine Transients With Controlled Variable Geometry

A small 5-kN thrust gas turbine, designed and manufactured having in mind a thorough source of validation data, serves as basis for the study. The engine is an uncooled turbine, 5:1 pressure ratio axial flow compressor, delivering 8.1 kg/s air mass flow, whose control is made by a FADEC. Cold runs of the jet engine version have already been completed. The engine characteristics are being developed using the technology indicated in the paper. Accelerations and decelerations from idle to full power in a prescribed time interval and positive surge margin are the limitations imposed to the control system. In order to accomplish such requirements, a proportional, integral and derivative (PID) has been implemented to control the variable geometry transients, which proved to drive the engine to the required operating points. Compressor surge is avoided during accelerations or decelerations, imposing operation limits to the surge margin. In order to simulate a jet engine under transient operation, use was made of high-fidelity in-house developed software. The results presented in the paper are related to the compressor inlet guide vane (VIGV) transients. The engine transient calculations were predicted with the IGV settings varying with time, and the results are being used for the initial calibration of the transfer functions for the real time control.© 2012 ASME

Comparison Between Unstructured and Structured Meshes With Different Turbulence Models for a High Pressure Turbine Application

For the CFD community the mesh generation is still one of the most important stages to obtain a good flow solution based on the full Navier-Stokes equations. For turbomachinery blade passages this task is not straightforward mainly due to the 3D domain and the complex geometries involved. The mesh quality and and elements distribution, orthogonality, smoothing, aspect ratio and angles are very important to guarantee a good numerical stability and solution accuracy. Moreover, the structure of the mesh inside the boundary-layer should be built carefully mainly in the regions where there are horseshoe vortices and tip leakage flow. In this work, the 3D turbulent flow is calculated and compared for structured and unstructured meshes including two equation models and Reynolds stress models. A high pressure turbine with 4.0 total-to-total pressure ratio is used in this study. A commercial software is used for mesh generation and flow calculation. The results are presented comparing the pressure ratio and efficiency from numerical solutions and experimental data and flow properties distributions along the blade span.Copyright

Performance Study of a 1 MW Gas Turbine Using Variable Geometry Compressor and Turbine Blade Cooling

This work presents the performance study of a 1 MW gas turbine including the effects of blade cooling and compressor variable geometry. The axial flow compressor, with Variable Inlet Guide Vane (VIGV), was designed for this application and its performance maps synthesized using own high technological contents computer programs. The performance study was performed using a specially developed computer program, which is able to numerically simulate gas turbine engines performance with high confidence, in all possible operating conditions. The effects of turbine blades cooling were calculated for different turbine inlet temperatures (TIT) and the influence of the amount of compressor-bled cooling air was studied, aiming at efficiency maximization, for a specified blade life and cooling technology. Details of compressor maps generation, cycle analysis and blade cooling are discussed.Copyright

Gas Turbine Performance Simulation Using an Optimized Axial Flow Compressor

Gas turbines need to operate efficiently due to the high specific fuel consumption. In order to reach the best possible efficiency the main gas turbine components, such as compressor and turbine, need to be optimized. This work reports the use of two specially developed computer programs: AFCC [1, 2] and GTAnalysis [3, 4] for such purpose. An axial flow compressor has been designed, using the AFCC computer program based on the stage-stacking technique. Major compressor design parameters are optimized at design point, searching for best efficiency and surge margin. Operation points are calculated and its characteristics maps are generated. The calculated compressor maps are incorporated to the GTAnalysis computer program for the engine performance calculation. Restrictions, like engine complexity, manufacture difficulties and control problems, are not taken into account.Copyright

Evaluation of Different Squealer Cavity Configurations in a HPT Blade Tip Region and its Influence on the Heat Transfer

In high performance turbomachines the tip region is a key point to improve aiming at high pressure ratios without high penalties. In the case of HPT, several techniques are still in development by academic research laboratories and industry. Some geometrical configurations were created at the rotor tip region, as winglets and squealers geometries. In the case of squealers, the depth of their cavity is an important parameter to evaluate, because its values can cause different flow behavior on this region. Changing the heat transfer. In this work, the rotor blade of a HPT developed in the E3 program was changed, the aim is to study the influence of the squealer cavity depth variation on its performance. The flow within the turbine was calculated using a commercial CFD package. The details of the rotor geometrical changes, the differences between a simple flat rotor tip surface and squealer configurations are discussed and presented.Copyright

Numerical Tools for High Performance Axial Compressor Design for Teaching Purpose

The preliminary design tools, for the design and performance analysis of axial flow compressors, has been developed based on reduced-order throughflow model. The in-house numerical tools developed specially for turbomachinery preliminary sizing and calculation of its operational characteristics is being an interesting experience in both under- and graduate lectures. Appropriate loss correlations have been selected aiming at good geometrical initial sizing. Flow properties distribution has been obtained using meanline code combined with a quasi-3D streamline curvature code. Any number of sections from hub to tip of each blade can be used for the determination of the blade shape. The compressor operation map calculated is validated against published test data. Details of the developed methodology and implementation are discussed.© 2012 ASME

Influence of Variable Geometry Transients on the Gas Turbine Performance

During the design of a gas turbine it is required the analysis of all possible operating points in the gas turbine operational envelope, for the sake of verification of whether or not the established performance might be achieved. In order to achieve the design requirements and to improve the engine off-design operation, a number of specific analyses must be carried out. This paper deals with the characterization of a small gas turbine under development with assistance from ITA (Technological Institute of Aeronautics), concerning the compressor variable geometry and its transient operation during accelerations and decelerations. The gas turbine is being prepared for the transient tests with the gas generator, whose results will be used for the final specification of the turboshaft power section. The gas turbine design has been carried out using indigenous software, developed specially to fulfill the requirements of the design of engines, as well as the support for validation of research work. The engine under construction is a small gas turbine in the range of 5 kN thrust / 1.2 MW shaft power, aiming at distributed power generation using combined cycle. The work reported in this paper deals with the variable inlet guide vane (VIGV) transients and the engine transients. A five stage 5:1 pressure ratio axial-flow compressor, delivering 8.1 kg/s air mass flow at design-point, is the basis for the study. The compressor was designed using computer programs developed at ITA for the preliminary design (meanline), for the axisymmetric analysis to calculate the full blade geometry (streamline curvature) and for the final compressor geometry definition (3-D RANS and turbulence models). The programs have been used interatively. After the final channel and blade geometry definition, the compressor map was generated and fed to the gas turbine performance simulation program. The transient study was carried out for a number of blade settings, using different VIGV geometry scheduling, giving indication that simulations needed to study the control strategy can be easily achieved. The results could not be validated yet, but are in agreement with the expected engine response when such configuration is used.Copyright

AN OBJECT-ORIENTED PARALLEL FINITE-VOLUME CFD CODE

This paper concerns the parallelization and optimization of an in-house three-dimensional unstructured finite-volume computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. It aims to highlight the use of programming techniques in order to speedup computation and minimize memory usage. The motivation for developing an in-house solver is that commercial codes are general and sometimes simulations are not in agreement with actual phenomena. Moreover, in-house models can be developed and easily integrated to the solver. The original code was initially written in Fortran 77 though the most recent added subroutines include Fortran 90 features. Due to language restrictions and the initial project objectives, issues such as memory usage minimization were not considered. The new code uses an object-oriented paradigm aiming to enhance code reuse and increase efficiency during application development. The parallel code is fully written in Fortran 90 using MPI and hence portable to different architectures. Numerical experiments of typical 3D cases, such as flat plate with uniform incoming flow and a converging-diverging supersonic nozzle, were carried out showing good parallel efficiency. The serial version of the ported code has shown a considerable reduction on the execution time compared to the original code. Convergent solutions agree with the solution of the original code.Copyright

Nacelle Design for Mixed Turbofan Engines

Nacelles are responsible for good engine performance and considerable percentage of total aircraft drag, thus fuel consumption. Energy conservation and cost of fuel, among others, require good nacelle design. CFD calculations of the flow around it are a major design tool to predict shock waves, internal boundary layer in the nacelle forebody, high velocity zones and wake. Commercially available software may be used to calculate and visualize the flow at the most critical parts of the nacelle, allowing design modifications aiming at optimizations. This paper overviews the literature on nacelles, the methodologies involved in the design. A case study is presented for a long duct nacelle design, using an axis-symmetric model. Performance characteristics at important operating conditions are also presented.Copyright

Influence of Variable Geometry Compressor on Transient Performance of Counter-rotating Open Rotor Engines

This work describes a methodology used for counter-rotating (CR) propellers performance estimation. The method is implemented in an in-house program for gas turbine performance prediction, making possible the simulation of the counter-rotating open rotor (CROR) architecture. The methodology is used together with a variable geometry compressor control strategy to avoid surge conditions. Two cases are simulated under transient operation for both fixed and variable geometry compressor. The influence of the variable geometry control on the transient performance of CROR engines is evaluated and a comprehensive understanding on the transient behavior of this type of engine could be obtained. It is shown that the use of the variable geometry compressor control does not significantly affect the overall engine performance, while avoiding the surge conditions, thus ensuring the engine operation safety.