Abstract

Correlations are of great importance in the preliminary design of a gas turbine engine. They are useful to determine the efficiency and thus the Specific Fuel Consumption (SFC of the engine, before even having blade geometries. Also, correlations play a very. important role in the understanding of the behavior (performance) of the engine, under different operating conditions. Since most correlations are obtained from expensive rig tests and cascades, and since cascades do not represent all the flow phenomena in actual engines, the necessity of finding less expensive and more realistic representations of the actual flow phenomena is becoming more and more important. With the great advances in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), CFD is becoming the tool of choice in the analysis of complex flow phenomena, such as that in gas turbine engines. In a novel cost-effective approach, it is proposed to use CFD as the experimental test-cell to generate these correlations and to extend their regime of applicability. Using a 3-D finite element viscous, compressible, turbulent code, developed jointly by Concordia University CFD laboratory and Pratt & Whitney Canada, CFD-based correlations for a high-pressure transonic turbine will be created and validated against Cold Flow Turbine Rig test data. This will be done by studying the effect of variation of four design and off-design parameters, on the performance characteristics of the turbine stage.