Laboratory Infrared Thermal Assessment of Laser-Sintered High-Pressure Nozzle Guide Vanes to Derisk Engine Design Programs

The continuing maturation of metal laser-sintering technology (direct metal laser sintering (DMLS)) presents the opportunity to derisk the engine design process by experimentally down-selecting high-pressure nozzle guide vane (HPNGV) cooling designs using laboratory tests of laser-sintered—instead of cast—parts to assess thermal performance. Such tests could be seen as supplementary to thermal-paint test engines, which are used during certification to validate cooling system designs. In this paper, we compare conventionally cast and laser-sintered titanium alloy parts in back-to-back experimental tests at engine-representative conditions over a range of coolant mass flow rates. Tests were performed in the University of Oxford Annular Sector Heat Transfer Facility. The thermal performance of the cast and laser-sintered parts—measured using new infrared processing techniques—is shown to be very similar, demonstrating the utility of laser-sintered parts for preliminary engine thermal assessments. We conclude that the methods reported in this paper are sufficiently mature to make assessments which could influence engine development programs.