Customized Profiles — The Beginning of an Era: A Short History of Blade Design

Abstract

The paper presents the evolutionary progress made in the design process of turbo machines from using standardized profiles — for turbine and compressor blades — towards individual profile designs. The emerging new power of numerical methods on continuously faster running electronic computers has made this progress possible. In addition there were regularly experimental verifications in cascade wind tunnels and turbo machinery test beds as well as applications of new design strategies. These strategies, i.e. naturally laminar flow in turbines and supercritical flow in compressors, also made use of reinvented inverse methods, as one tool to optimise problematic areas.