Date of Award

Spring 4-2005

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Aerospace Engineering

Department

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Magdy Attia

Committee Member

Hany Nakhla

Committee Member

L.L. Narayanaswaml

Abstract

The turbine component of a gas turbine engine is the most costly component due to its complexity, and life requirements, given the harsh environment in which it is required to operate. Minimizing the number of stages can lead to significant savings in terms of development efforts, materials, and serviceable parts. This philosophy has led to a significant increase in the work demanded from the typical stage. In this work, a highly loaded axial turbine stage was designed for high power-output industrial applications using a comprehensive set of investigations, which included parametric studies, throughflow solutions, and 2D airfoil shapes. The design procedure was defined and used for the conceptual design calculations; several parametric studies were conducted to assess the impact of various critical design parameters such as degree of reaction, rotor exit conditions, and annulus shape. A winning design was chosen based on several factors, and the Free Vortex solution was employed to define the design boundary conditions for the airfoils hubs and tips. The NASA Throughflow Code (TDII) was used to generate the throughflow solution for the stage, and 2D airfoil shape design and analysis was performed using an in-house code (T-Foil) for the design, and the commercial CFD code (Star-CD) for the mesh and flow solutions.

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