Novel turbomachinery concepts for highly integrated airframe/propulsion systems

Two novel turbomachinery concepts are presented as enablers to advanced flight missions requiring integrated airframe/propulsion systems. The first concept is motivated by thermal management challenges in low-to-high Mach number (4+) aircraft. The idea of compressor cooling combines the compressor and heat exchanger function to stretch turbopropulsion system operational limits. Axial compressor performance with blade passage heat extraction is assessed with computational experiments and meanline modeling. A cooled multistage compressor with adiabatic design point is found to achieve higher pressure ratio, choking mass flow, and efficiency (referenced to an adiabatic, reversible process) at fixed corrected speed, with greatest benefit occurring through front-stage cooling. Heat removal equal to one percent of inlet stagnation enthalpy flux in each of the first four blade rows suggests pressure ratio, efficiency, and choked flow improvements of 23%, 12%, and 5% relative to a baseline, eight-stage compressor with pressure ratio of 5. Cooling is also found to unchoke rear stages at low corrected speed. Heat transfer estimations indicate that surface area limitations and temperature differences favor rear-stage cooling and suggest the existence of an optimal cooling distribution.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Shah, Parthiv N

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Zoltan Spakovszky and Choon Sooi Tan.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38929

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38929