Due to the critical importance of the turbopump applied in Liquid-Propellant Rocket Engines (LPRE) and the importance in the use of specific engineering software to design and analyze turbomachines, a Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology was implemented in the undergraduate Turbopumps (TP) discipline at the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), taught for aerospace engineering students. This methodology was applied, using as a class example, the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) booster turbine of the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), aiming at an enhancement in the discipline’s syllabus, to become the theory and practice closer to the real engineering, and to increase the discipline’s attractiveness. The results obtained with this methodology showed that the students have more interest and attention in the classes in which an engineering problem is evaluated and discussed with details using appropriate examples and engineering software that are used by the academia and industry. Several turbomachines issues as velocity triangles, power, blade geometrical aspects, flow quality, losses and in this case, the importance of tip clearance, could be better understood by the students. About the numerical results, the aim is that the students, after the preliminary project ends, evaluate the results and compare them with experimental data from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). One of the most important experience in this project is the results evaluation by the students and the discussion around it, as lessons learned, given suggestions to improve the project, if the results are not in the right way what can be done to correct them and understanding all physical phenomena involved. The learning experience was fascinating and effective, as noticed by students and noted by Professors.

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The gas turbine industry requires extensive knowledge in several areas of engineering, and since both industry and academy continuously develop new approaches, technologies, and models, usually, there is not enough time to cover all the relevant subjects in one or two-semester courses for undergraduate or graduate students. In previous work, the authors have presented an interactive platform for the preliminary design of single-stage axial turbines with uncooled blades, for use at the undergraduate courses offered by the Turbomachine Department at Aeronautics Institute of Technology to accelerate the learning process. The present work aims to present an expansion of this interactive learning platform, with the inclusion of a module for the thermodynamic cycle study, a module for off-design calculations, and the generation of a PDF file containing the step-by-step solution memorial with all the equations and values used in the design. The work also presents a structure for the conduction of a graduate course in turbomachines focused on the design of axial turbines. It comprehends theory and exercise classes, oriented study with the interactive learning platform, and a project in which the students have to implement some of the modules and run test cases. The authors observed more interest of the students and higher quality questions in the classes while using the interactive platform or programming, developing a better understanding of the design process until the end of the course. Also, while, in previous semesters, the preliminary design occupied almost half of the 48-hour course, it took only 12-hour to cover the same subject, granting time to more advanced topics, such as blade cooling, off-design performance and computational fluid dynamics simulations.

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