An Educational Software Suite for Teaching Design Strategies for Multistage Axial Flow Compressors

The T-AXI turbomachinery design system, an axisymmetric methodology recently developed with an educational purpose, has shown great capabilities in the redesign of existing axial flow gas turbine components. Different turbomachines, single or multistage configurations, have been already reproduced with excellent overall performance results: examples are the NASA/GE E³ HP compressor and LP turbine. In this paper, the authors present a detailed analysis of the results of a “case-study” application of the code as a complementary tool to be used during a turbomachinery design course. The NASA/GE E³ HP compressor has been chosen as the test case. Starting from the data available in open literature the different steps of the redesign have been reported: from the flowpath generation through the thermodynamic properties distributions to the overall turbomachine performance analysis. Particular attention has been given to some critical aero design parameters. The links to some interesting and useful literature sources are reported. The free-vortex, the only vortex law included in the first version of the code has been used for a first EEE compressor redesign. Different design vortex methodologies have been implemented in the new release of the code and their effects on the angular momentum are reported. The corresponding geometries can also be interfaced to a mesh generator and then the turbomachinery configurations analyzed by a 3D Navier-Stokes solver. In this way the flow field can be carefully analyzed and the fluid-dynamic physics better understood. With the above software structure the student has the opportunity to test the effects of different design strategies on the turbomachinery performance and to understand the need of a hierarchy of tools that give complete information for the multistage turbomachinery design. Finally, in the last section of the paper, the authors present how a project such as T-AXI, developed from their research activity in turbomachinery, numerical methods and CFD, can be included in the education tool CompEdu.