Bladed Disk Education Suite

Packages:

Bundle (T-AXI Blade and Disk) package.zip
T-AXI Blade v1.9 package.zip
T-AXI Disk v2.5 package.zip

Description:

Many undergraduate aerospace engineering programs offer basic classes on compressor and turbine design, but their effectiveness is debatable. Time and financial restraints usually limit any design work to a simple, pen-and-paper method. This approach to turbomachinery design is time-tested and very important, but often has some undesirable side effects. Experience with students in the Aerospace Engineering program at the University of Cincinnati has revealed that some students become proficient with the free-vortex blade design equations without ever truly understanding the geometry and physics of the system they are working with: effectively "plugging and chugging" their way through turbomachinery design. Another problem with this simple approach is that it does very little to imprint students with the multidisciplinary nature of any real world design work. The overall efficiency and operational cost of a turbomachinery component depends on much more than just blade and flowpath design. The mass of and stresses in the supporting structures, such as the disk, must also be considered.

The problems with the current approach to turbomachinery education are clear, and members of the University of Cincinnati Gas Turbine Simulation Laboratory (GTSL) built the Bladed Disk Education Suite specifically to address them. T-Axi Blade is a GUI based, free-vortex blade row design and visualization program. The primary purpose of T-Axi Blade is to develop students' physical understanding of key blade design features, with a special emphasis on the relationship between velocity triangles and blade shapes. T-Axi Disk is a GUI based turbomachinery disk design, analysis, and optimization program. This program allows students to quickly and easily design a support structure for any axially configured blade row, something that is nearly impossible using a pen-and-paper design method. Taken together, the two programs can be used as a powerful introduction to multidisciplinary engineering. Recent additions to the Bladed Disk Education Suite have greatly improved its usefulness, making it a very capable tool for low-fidelity design of true turbomachinery components.

Early versions of the Bladed Disk Education Suite have been used as a teaching aid in a fourth year airbreathing propulsions class at UC with positive feedback. Testimonials from the class coming soon.

T-AXI Blade (latest v1.9)

Interactive design with easy to use GUI
On-the-fly creation of velocity triangles and blade shapes
Seamless support of both compressor and turbine blade design
Full support for axial and centrifugal designs
Tabular output of performance values and flow angles at the blade hub, pitch, and tip
Formatted output of common turbomachinery equations, solved for the current case
One click creation of 3D blade geometry and imput files for use with T-AXI Disk

Program Screenshots: [1] [2]

T-AXI Disk (latest v2.5)

Interactive design with easy to use GUI
Detailed 2D and 3D stress contour plots
Rapid design optimization using a genetic algorithm
Automatic design tracking to enable "trial and error" learning
Five disk definition methods:

Web, Ring, Hyperbolic
Continuous Slope
Arbitrary Control Point

Support for isotropic (metals) and transversely isotropic (composite) materials
Termperature dependant material database with 10 common disk materials
Automatic dead weight estimation using geometry from T-AXI Blade
Automatic creation of Finite Element data for use with ANSYS v11.0

Program Screenshots: [1] [2]
Videos - Disk Optimization: [1] [2]
Other Downloads: EEE 3rd Stage Optimized Inputs Class Assignment

Authors:

Professor Mark G. Turner, University of Cincinnati - mark.turner@uc.edu
David Gutzwiller, University of Cincinnati - gutzwidp@email.uc.edu
Michael Downing, University of Cincinnati - downinml@mail.uc.edu

Related Publications:

ASME GT2009-59692 :: Educational Software for Blade and Disk Design
Masters Thesis - David Gutzwiller :: Automated Design, Analysis, and Optimization of Turbomachinery Disks