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Applications of coal fired atmospheric fluidized bed gas turbine systems in industrial cogeneration are identified. Based on site-specific conceptual designs, the potential benefits of the AFB/gas turbine system were compared with an atmospheric fluidized design steam boiler/steam turbine system. The application of these cogeneration systems at four industrial plant sites is reviewed. A performance and benefit analysis was made along with a study of the representativeness of the sites both in regard to their own industry and compared to industry as a whole. A site was selected for the conceptual design, which included detailed site definition, AFB/gas turbine and AFB/steam turbine cogeneration system designs, detailed cost estimates, and comparative performance and benefit analysis. Market and benefit analyses identified the potential market penetration for the cogeneration technologies and quantified the potential benefits.
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Modeling enhancements made to a radial-inflow turbine conceptual design code are documented in this report. A stator-endwall clearance-flow model was added for use with pivoting vanes. The rotor calculations were modified to account for swept blades and splitter blades. Stator and rotor trailing-edge losses and a vaneless-space loss were added to the loss model. Changes were made to the disk-friction and rotor-clearance loss calculations. The loss model was then calibrated based on experimental turbine performance. A complete description of code input and output along with sample cases are included in the report.
A semivaneless turbine stator designed to eliminate blade wakes and secondary-flow accumulations of boundary-layer air was built and tested. Performance of this stator was evaluated with static pressures measured in the vaneless section and surveys of total pressure and flow angle made at the stator exit. Results are presented in terms of theoretical and experimental velocities and flow angles, boundary-layer parameters, and contours of total-pressure loss across the stator.
As part of a program to reduce wind turbine costs, an evaluation was conducted of a laminated wood composite blade for the Mod-OA 200 kW wind turbine. The effort included the design and fabrication concept for the blade, together with cost and load analyses. The blade structure is composed of laminated Douglas fir veneers for the primary spar and nose sections, and honeycomb cored plywood panels for the trailing edges sections. The attachment of the wood blade to the rotor hub was through load takeoff studs bonded into the blade root. Tests were conducted on specimens of the key structural components to verify the feasibility of the concept. It is concluded that the proposed wood composite blade design and fabrication concept is suitable for Mod-OA size turbines (125-ft diameter rotor) at a cost that is very competitive with other methods of manufacture.
NASA's OpenMDAO framework facilitates constructing complex models and computing their derivatives for multidisciplinary design optimization. Decomposing a model into components that follow a prescribed interface enables OpenMDAO to assemble multidisciplinary derivatives from the component derivatives using what amounts to the adjoint method, direct method, chain rule, global sensitivity equations, or any combination thereof, using the MAUD architecture. OpenMDAO also handles the distribution of processors among the disciplines by hierarchically grouping the components, and it automates the data transfer between components that are on different processors. These features have made OpenMDAO useful for applications in aircraft design, satellite design, wind turbine design, and aircraft engine design, among others. This paper presents new algorithms for OpenMDAO that enable reconfigurable model execution. This concept refers to dynamically changing, during execution, one or more of: the variable sizes, solution algorithm, parallel load balancing, or set of variables-i.e., adding and removing components, perhaps to switch to a higher-fidelity sub-model. Any component can reconfigure at any point, even when running in parallel with other components, and the reconfiguration algorithm presented here performs the synchronized updates to all other components that are affected. A reconfigurable software framework for multidisciplinary design optimization enables new adaptive solvers, adaptive parallelization, and new applications such as gradient-based optimization with overset flow solvers and adaptive mesh refinement. Benchmarking results demonstrate the time savings for reconfiguration compared to setting up the model again from scratch, which can be significant in large-scale problems. Additionally, the new reconfigurability feature is applied to a mission profile optimization problem for commercial aircraft where both the parametrization of the mission profile and the time discretization are adaptively refined, resulting in computational savings of roughly 10% and the elimination of oscillations in the optimized altitude profile.
Abstract One of the critical components in Industrial Gas Turbines (IGT) is the turbine blade. Design of turbine blades needs to consider multiple aspects like aerodynamic efficiency, durability, safety and manufacturing, which make the design process sequential and iterative. The sequential nature of these iterations forces a long design cycle time, ranging from several months to years. Due to the reactionary nature of these iterations, little effort has been made to accumulate data in a manner that allows for deep exploration and understanding of the total design space. This is exemplified in the process of designing the individual components of the IGT resulting in a potential unrealized efficiency. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we demonstrate a probabilistic inverse design machine learning framework, namely PMI (PMI), to carry out an explicit inverse design. PMI calculates the design explicitly without costly iteration and overcomes the challenges associated with ill-posed inverse problems. In this work the framework will be demonstrated on inverse aerodynamic design of three-dimensional turbine blades.
The overall performance and detailed stator performance of a negative hub reaction turbine design featuring a moderately low solidity jet flap stator and a jet flap rotor were determined. Testing was conducted over a range of turbine expansion ratios at design speed. At each expansion ratio, the stator jet flow and rotor jet flow ranged up to about 7 and 8 percent, respectively, of the turbine inlet flow. The performance of the jet flap stator/jet flap rotor turbine was compared with that of a turbine which used the same jet flap rotor and a conventional, high solidity plan stator. The effect on performance of increased axial spacing between the jet stator and rotor was also investigated.
This study proposes a novel approach to explore the solution space of a wind turbine rotor design process. The goal is to offer to blade designers the possibility to select an optimal rotor for given market conditions, assessing trade-offs and alternatives in a matter of minutes. The design process consists of sequential aerodynamic-structural optimizations, where the two loops are linked via a blade-loading parameter that can be varied by the user. A design study is performed starting from the IEA Wind Task 37 land-based reference wind turbine. The solution space is characterized for rotor diameters in the range of 130–160 m, rated generator power values in the range of 3.0–6.0 MW, and tip-speed ratios in the range of 7.5–12.5. Results are discussed highlighting optimal design decisions and trade-offs.
Three-dimensional flow phenomena in a supersonic turbine blade row were studied numerically to evaluate CFD as a tool to design supersonic turbine stages. The details of the three-dimensional flow structure inside the supersonic turbine blade row and the overall aerodynamic performance at design and off-design conditions are analyzed and the results are compared between the experimental data and the numerical results.
This paper presents the Marshal Space Flight Center Fluids Workshop on Turbine Aerodynamic design tool development. The topics include: (1) Meanline Design/Off-design Analysis; and (2) Airfoil Contour Generation and Analysis. This paper is in viewgraph form.
In this study, a cooled gas turbine analysis was conducted for varying levels of hydrogen (H 2 ) blends with the natural gas. The ultimate goal is to have a gas turbine design that can be used for all the fuel blends (including 100% H 2 ) without any changes to the system. The technological developments in the cooling system, gas turbine design and materials that will be required for H 2 combustion were identified and analyzed in this study to develop an advanced gas turbine design for H 2 fuels. The study includes a combined cycle performance analysis with the H 2 fuel blends using the advanced gas turbine design developed in this study. A techno-economic analysis was conducted for analyzing the impact of the H 2 fuels on the levelized cost of electricity and cost sensitivities to fuel price and capacity factor.
In this study, a cooled gas turbine (GT) analysis was conducted for varying levels of ammonia (NH 3 ) blends with methane. The ultimate goal is to have a gas turbine design that can be used for all the fuel blends (including 100% NH 3 ) without any changes to the system. The technological developments in the cooling system, gas turbine design, and materials that will be required for NH 3 combustion were identified and analyzed in this study to develop an advanced gas turbine design for NH 3 fuels. The study includes a combined cycle performance analysis with the NH 3 fuel blends using the advanced gas turbine design developed in this study. A techno-economic analysis was conducted for analyzing the impact of the NH 3 fuels on the levelized cost of electricity and cost sensitivities to fuel price and capacity factor.
Limitations on turbojet engine design by turbines with downstream stators
This paper attempts a comparative study of some numerical methods for the optimal control design of turbine blades whose vibration characteristics are approximated by Timoshenko beam idealizations with shear and incorporating simple boundary conditions. The blade was synthesized using the following methods: (1) conjugate gradient minimization of the system Hamiltonian in function space incorporating penalty function transformations, (2) projection operator methods in a function space which includes the frequencies of vibration and the control function, (3) epsilon-technique penalty function transformation resulting in a highly nonlinear programming problem, (4) finite difference discretization of the state equations again resulting in a nonlinear program, (5) second variation methods with complex state differential equations to include damping effects resulting in systems of inhomogeneous matrix Riccatti equations some of which are stiff, (6) quasi-linear methods based on iterative linearization of the state and adjoint equation. The paper includes a discussion of some substantial computational difficulties encountered in the implementation of these techniques together with a resume of work presently in progress using a differential dynamic programming approach.
The energy efficient engine high-pressure turbine is a single stage system based on technology advancements in the areas of aerodynamics, structures and materials to achieve high performance, low operating economics and durability commensurate with commercial service requirements. Low loss performance features combined with a low through-flow velocity approach results in a predicted efficiency of 88.8 for a flight propulsion system. Turbine airfoil durability goals are achieved through the use of advanced high-strength and high-temperature capability single crystal materials and effective cooling management. Overall, this design reflects a considerable extension in turbine technology that is applicable to future, energy efficient gas-turbine engines.
Probabilistic methods are commonly adopted to estimate both ultimate and fatigue loads in wind turbines, and multiple papers have presented a variety of approaches. In contrast, system-level, integrated design optimization methods for wind turbines have so far relied on deterministic methods to estimate loads and deflections. This work aims at addressing this gap by adopting importance sampling to estimate ultimate blade deflection for use within a rotor design optimization. A comparison between the results of this approach against traditional approaches using deterministic load evaluations show that the probabilistic approach is more conservative and that the solutions found with deterministic approaches violate the probabilistic constraint on tip deflection between 13% and 17%. This highlights the importance of accurate load and deflection estimates and demonstrates that probabilistic approaches can be successfully integrated within a wind turbine design process despite the higher computational costs.