Data re-use for preliminary thermal-mechanical design of gas turbine engines

Abstract

ABSTRACTThermal-mechanical design is a time-consuming process even at its preliminary design stage. This is due to the large number of components and boundary condition data, the complexity of the geometry, and the iterative nature of the design process. The conventional design process separates the geometric and physical models and results in considerable human interventions during the design process. By assigning the breakpoints to engine assembly features as internal parameters, this article reports a novel feature-based design approach where the associated boundary conditions are represented parametrically along the feature geometric contours. They are updated automatically as per the geometrical changes, including topological changes, and hence bridging the gap between the geometric and physical models. The current approach enables data re-use of both the geometries and physical information from previous engine designs to generate new designs, dispensing with the excessive human interventions. Although the methodology is generic and applicable to other design scenarios, its capability is demonstrated in this article by some representative challenging industrial applications, sitting in the 2D preliminary gas-turbine design domain. The test cases show that the method can significantly reduce the time-cost of the iterative thermal-mechanical design flow.