SpinOffs

The contemporary gas turbine engine, developed in the 1940’s by Sir Frank Whittle (pictured), is still considered to be among the most efficient, external combustion engines. Today, there is a resurgent interest in power generation technology driven by humankind’s insatiable need for more power. A popular focus is to extend the Brayton Cycle, the thermodynamic basis for a gas turbine engine, to using CO₂ in a closed Brayton Cycle. This is commonly referred to as a Supercritical CO₂ (sCO₂) system. As the name implies, the CO₂ is at pressures above the critical point of CO₂ or 1,070 psia. The highest pressure in the cycle can often be designed to be 4 times this pressure and operate at temperatures as high as 700°C at the inlet to the turbine. 

The recent announcement that Bosch Mahle Turbosystems is up for sale demonstrates just how difficult it is to succeed in the mainstream turbo market that is already served by very well established OEMs. It’s hard to see that they did anything wrong. They were funded by two very large companies, they had a very large lead customer, a realistic timescale to profitability, and an early presence in China.

The testing of turboshaft engines is necessary to ensure that post-repair performance meets or exceeds requirements for safe aircraft operation.  Testing typically involves several phases such as:  seal break-in; transient response; performance check and control system validation.  Dynamometers are used to simulate the load imposed during operation during testing.

Arbitrary blade section profiling is an essential part of designing high performance axial turbines and compressors. In most cases such blade section models are formed by hybrid use of arbitrary curves and blade section parameters, such as blade angles, chord, sizing of edges, wedge angles etc. Hybrid blade section models deliver to the design  process  both convenience and flexibility of controlling section geometry.