Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “turbofan engines”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 109 records · Page 6

Modeling of Highly Instrumented Honeywell Turbofan Engine Tested with Ice Crystal Ingestion in the NASA Propulsion System Laboratory

The Propulsion Systems Laboratory (PSL), an altitude test facility at NASA Glenn Research Center, has been used to test a highly instrumented turbine engine at simulated altitude operating conditions. This is a continuation of the PSL testing that successfully duplicated the icing events that were experienced in a previous engine (serial LF01) during flight through ice crystal clouds, which was the first turbofan engine tested in PSL. This second model of the ALF502R-5A serial number LF11 is a highly instrumented version of the previous engine. The PSL facility provides a continuous cloud of ice crystals with controlled characteristics of size and concentration, which are ingested by the engine during operation at simulated altitudes. Several of the previous operating points tested in the LF01 engine were duplicated to confirm repeatability in LF11. The instrumentation included video cameras to visually illustrate the accretion of ice in the low pressure compressor (LPC) exit guide vane region in order to confirm the ice accretion, which was suspected during the testing of the LF01. Traditional instrumentation included static pressure taps in the low pressure compressor inner and outer flow path walls, as well as total pressure and temperature rakes in the low pressure compressor region. The test data was utilized to determine the losses and blockages due to accretion in the exit guide vane region of the LPC. Multiple data points were analyzed with the Honeywell Customer Deck. A full engine roll back point was modeled with the Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) code. The mean line compressor flow analysis code with ice crystal modeling was utilized to estimate the parameters that indicate the risk of accretion, as well as to estimate the degree of blockage and losses caused by accretion during a full engine roll back point. The analysis provided additional validation of the icing risk parameters within the LPC, as well as the creation of models for estimating the rates of blockage growth and losses.

Simulation↗

Failure detection and correction for turbofan engines

In this paper, a failure detection and correction strategy for turbofan engines is discussed. This strategy allows continuing control of the engines in the event of a sensor failure. An extended Kalman filter is used to provide the best estimate of the state of the engine based on currently available sensor outputs. Should a sensor failure occur the control is based on the best estimate rather than the sensor output. The extended Kalman filter consists of essentially two parts, a nonlinear model of the engine and up-date logic which causes the model to track the actual engine. Details on the model and up-date logic are presented. To allow implementation, approximations are made to the feedback gain matrix which result in a single feedback matrix which is suitable for use over the entire flight envelope. The effect of these approximations on stability and response is discussed. Results from a detailed nonlinear simulation indicate that good control can be maintained even under multiple failures.

Corley, R. C.↗

Effect of flight loads on turbofan engine performance deterioration

A significant percentage of high-bypass-ratio turbofan engine performance deterioration is caused by an increase in operating clearance between fan/compressor and turbine blades and their outer air seals. These increased clearances result from rubs induced by a combination of engine power transients and aircraft flight loads. An analytical technique for predicting the effect of quasi-steady state aircraft flight loads on engine performance deterioration has been developed and is presented. Thrust, aerodynamic and inertia loads are considered. Analytical results are shown and compared to actual engine test experience.

Stakolich, E. G.↗

Core noise investigation of the CF6-50 turbofan engine

Acoustic data obtained during the running of the CF6-50 turbofan engine on an outdoor test stand are presented. The test was conducted to acquire simultaneous internal and far-field measurements to determine the influence of internally generated noise on the far-field measurements. The data includes internal and far-field narrowband and one-third octave band pressure spectra.

Doyle, V. L.↗

3D Multistage Simulation of Each Component of the GE90 Turbofan Engine

A 3D multistage simulation of each component of the GE90 Turbofan engine has been made. This includes 49 blade rows. A coupled simulation of all blade rows will be made very soon. The simulation is running using two levels of parallelism. The first level is on a blade row basis with information shared using files. The second level is using a grid domain decomposition with information shared using MPI. Timings will be shown for running on the SP2, an SGI Origin and a distributed system of HP workstations. On the HP workstations, the CHIMP version of MPI is used, with queuing supplied by LSF (Load Sharing Facility). A script-based control system is used to ensure reliability. An MPEG movie illustrating the flow simulation of the engine has been created using PV3, a parallel visualization library created by Bob Haimes of MIT. PVM is used to create a virtual machine from 10 HP workstations and display on an SGI workstation. A representative component simulation will be compared to rig data to demonstrate its usefulness in turbomachinery design and analysis.

Turner, Mark↗

Collaboration with Williams International to Demonstrate the Characteristics of a Foam-Metal-Liner Installed Over-the-Rotor of a Turbofan Engine

A Williams International FJ44-3A 3000-lb thrust class turbofan engine was used as a demonstrator for foam-metal liner installed in close proximity to the fan. Two foam metal liner designs were tested and compared to the hardwall. Traditional Single-Degree-of-Freedom liner designs were also evaluated to provide a comparison. Normalized information on farfield acoustics is presented in this paper. The results show that up to 5 dB PWL overall attenuation was achieved in the forward quadrant. In general, the foam-metal liners performed better when the fan tip speed was below sonic.

Sutliff, Daniel↗

Demonstration of a Packaged Capacitive Pressure Sensor System Suitable for Jet Turbofan Engine Health Monitoring

In this paper, the development and characterization of a packaged pressure sensor system suitable for jet engine health monitoring is demonstrated. The sensing system operates from 97 to 117 MHz over a pressure range from 0 to 350 psi and a temperature range from 25 to 500 deg. The sensing system consists of a Clapp-type oscillator that is fabricated on an alumina substrate and is comprised of a Cree SiC MESFET, MIM capacitors, a wire-wound inductor, chip resistors and a SiCN capacitive pressure sensor. The pressure sensor is located in the LC tank circuit of the oscillator so that a change in pressure causes a change in capacitance, thus changing the resonant frequency of the sensing system. The chip resistors, wire-wound inductors and MIM capacitors have all been characterized at temperature and operational frequency, and perform with less than 5% variance in electrical performance. The measured capacitive pressure sensing system agrees very well with simulated results. The packaged pressure sensing system is specifically designed to measure the pressure on a jet turbofan engine. The packaged system can be installed by way of borescope plug adaptor fitted to a borescope port exposed to the gas path of a turbofan engine.

Harsh environment↗

Measurement of gaseous emissions from a turbofan engine at simulated altitude conditions

Gaseous emission from a TFE 731-2 turbofan engine were measured over a range of fuel-air ratios from idle to full power at simulated from near sea level to 13,200 m. Carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbon emissions were highest at idle and lowest at high power settings; oxides of nitrogen exhibited the reverse trend. Carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbon levels decreased with increasing altitude. Oxides of nitrogen emissions were successfully correlated by a parametric group of combustor operating variables.

Diehl, L. A.↗

Gaseous exhaust emissions from a JT8D-109 turbofan engine at simulated cruise flight conditions

Gaseous emissions from a JT8D-109 turbofan engine were measured in an altitude facility at four simulated cruise flight conditions: Mach 0.8 at altitudes of 9.1, 10, 7, and 12.2 km and Mach 0.9 at 10.7 km. Engine inlet air temperature was held constant at 283 K for all tests. Emissions measurements were made at nominally 6 cm intervals across the horizontal diameter of the engine exhaust nozzle with a single-point traversing gas sample probe. Measured emissions of decreased with increasing altitude from an emission index of 10.4 to one of 8.3, while carbon monoxide increased with increasing altitude from an emission index of 1.6 to one of 4.4. Unburned hydrocarbon emissions were essentially negligible for all flight conditions. Since the engine inlet air temperatures were not correctly simulated, the NOx emission indices were corrected to true altitude conditions by using correlating parameters for changes in combustor inlet temperature, pressure, and temperature rise. The correction was small at the lowest altitude. At the 10.7 and 12.2 km, Mach 0.8 test conditions the correction decreased the measured values by 1 emission index.

Diehl, L. A.↗

Conceptual design of single turbofan engine powered light aircraft

The conceptual design of a four place single turbofan engine powered light aircraft was accomplished utilizing contemporary light aircraft conventional design techniques as a means of evaluating the NASA-Ames General Aviation Synthesis Program (GASP) as a preliminary design tool. In certain areas, disagreement or exclusion were found to exist between the results of the conventional design and GASP processes. Detail discussion of these points along with the associated contemporary design methodology are presented.

Snyder, F. S.↗

Measurements and predictions of flyover and static noise of an afterburning turbofan engine in an F-111 airplane

The noise of the TF30 afterburning turbofan engine in an F-111 airplane was determined from static (ground) and flyover tests. Exhaust temperatures and velocity profiles were measured for a range of power settings. Comparisons were made between predicted and measured jet mixing, internal, and shock noise. It was found that the noise produced at static conditions was dominated by jet mixing noise, and was adequately predicted by current methods. The noise produced during flyovers exhibited large contributions from internally generated noise in the forward arc. For flyovers with the engine at nonafterburning power, the internal noise, shock noise, and jet mixing noise were accurately predicted. During flyovers with afterburning power settings, however, additional internal noise believed to be due to the afterburning process was evident; its level was as much as 8 decibels above the nonafterburning internal noise.

Burcham, F. W., Jr.↗

Applications of finite element and wave envelope element approximations to turbofan engine noise radiation including flight effects

The problem of acoustic radiation from turbofan engine inlets in flow has not lent itself fully to analysis by numerical means because of the large domains and high frequencies involved. The current work has extended the use of finite elements and wave envelope elements, elements which simulate decay and wavelike behaviour in their interpolation functions, from the no-flow case in which they have been proven, to cases incorporating mean flow. By employing an irrotational mean flow assumption, the acoustics problem has been posed in an axisymmetric formulation in terms of acoustic velocity potential, thus minimizing computer solution storage requirements. The results obtained from the numerical procedures agree well with known analytical solutions, static experimental jet engines inflow data, and also with flight test results.

Parrett, A. V.↗

Active control of fan noise from a turbofan engine

A three channel active control system is applied to an operational turbofan engine in order to reduce tonal noise produced by both the fan and high pressure compressor. The control approach is the feedforward filtered-x least-mean-square algorithm implemented on a digital signal processing board. Reference transducers mounted on the engine case provides blade passing and harmonics frequency information to the controller. Error information is provided by large area microphones placed in the acoustic far field. In order to minimize the error signal, the controller actuates loudspeakers mounted on the inlet to produce destructive interference. The sound pressure level of the fundamental tone of the fan was reduced using the three channel controller by up to 16 dB over a 60 deg angle about the engine axis. A single channel controller could produce reduction over a 30 deg angle. The experimental results show the control to be robust. Simultaneous control of two tones is done with parallel controllers. The fundamental and the first harmonic tones of the fan were controlled simultaneously with reductions of 12 dBA and 5 dBA, respectively, measured on the engine axis. Simultaneous control was also demonstrated for the fan fundamental and the high pressure compressor fundamental tones.

Thomas, Russell H.↗

Parallel 3D Multi-Stage Simulation of a Turbofan Engine

A 3D multistage simulation of each component of a modern GE Turbofan engine has been made. An axisymmetric view of this engine is presented in the document. This includes a fan, booster rig, high pressure compressor rig, high pressure turbine rig and a low pressure turbine rig. In the near future, all components will be run in a single calculation for a solution of 49 blade rows. The simulation exploits the use of parallel computations by using two levels of parallelism. Each blade row is run in parallel and each blade row grid is decomposed into several domains and run in parallel. 20 processors are used for the 4 blade row analysis. The average passage approach developed by John Adamczyk at NASA Lewis Research Center has been further developed and parallelized. This is APNASA Version A. It is a Navier-Stokes solver using a 4-stage explicit Runge-Kutta time marching scheme with variable time steps and residual smoothing for convergence acceleration. It has an implicit K-E turbulence model which uses an ADI solver to factor the matrix. Between 50 and 100 explicit time steps are solved before a blade row body force is calculated and exchanged with the other blade rows. This outer iteration has been coined a "flip." Efforts have been made to make the solver linearly scaleable with the number of blade rows. Enough flips are run (between 50 and 200) so the solution in the entire machine is not changing. The K-E equations are generally solved every other explicit time step. One of the key requirements in the development of the parallel code was to make the parallel solution exactly (bit for bit) match the serial solution. This has helped isolate many small parallel bugs and guarantee the parallelization was done correctly. The domain decomposition is done only in the axial direction since the number of points axially is much larger than the other two directions. This code uses MPI for message passing. The parallel speed up of the solver portion (no 1/0 or body force calculation) for a grid which has 227 points axially.

Turner, Mark G.↗

Simplified off-design performance model of a day turbofan engine cycle

The specific thrust and fuel-air ratio for a dry turbofan engine cycle were calculated for several power levels over a range of altitudes and Mach numbers. The engine has a design fan pressure ratio of 2.9, compressor pressure ratio of 8.0, and bypass ratio of 0.6. Nominal engine component curves were picked to approximate the calculated data to construct a simplified model of the off-design performance of the engine. The model was then used to construct a simplified design-point engine model for the full-power condition.

Lallman, F. J.↗

Unsteady fan blade pressure and acoustic radiation from a JT15D-1 turbofan engine at simulated forward speed

Tests have been conducted on a JT15D-1 turbofan engine both statically and at simulated forward speed in the Ames 12 x 24 Meter Wind Tunnel. Both far-field acoustic data and unsteady pressure data from transducers mounted on the fan blades were acquired. Results showed a sound power reduction of about 10 dB in the far-field acoustic levels with simulated forward speed over those measured without forward speed. Blade mounted transducer results showed rotor-turbulence interaction dominated the noise field at very low speeds while an interaction between the rotor and internal struts dominated at higher speeds. Results are presented to show the effects of varying engine rpm, changing the angle-of-attack of the engine inlet to tunnel flow and mounting an aircraft wing to simulate an installation condition on an actual aircraft.

Preisser, J. S.↗