NASA's Role in Gas Turbine Technology Development: Accelerating Technical Progress Via Collaboration Between Academia, Industry, and Government Agencies

Abstract

Given the maturity of the gas turbine engine since its invention and considering the limited resources expected to be allocated for NASA aeronautics research and development, we ask the question are NASA technology investments still needed to enable future turbine engine-based propulsion systems? If so, what is NASA's unique role to justify NASA's investment? To address this topic, we first summarize NASA's role and contributions to turbine engine development, specific to both 1) NASA's role in conducting experiments to understand flow physics and provide relevant benchmark validation experiments for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code development, validation, and assessment; and 2) the impact of technologies resulting from NASA collaborations with industry, academia, and other government agencies. Note that the scope of the discussion is limited to the NASA technology contributions with which the author was intimately associated, and does not represent the entirety of the NASA contributions to turbine engine technology. The specific research, development, and demonstrations discussed herein were selected to both 1) provide a comprehensive review and reference list of the technology and its impact, and 2) identify NASA's unique role and highlight how NASA's involvement resulted in additional benefit to the gas turbine engine community. Secondly, we will discuss current NASA collaborations that are in progress and provide a status of the results. Finally, we discuss the challenges anticipated for future turbine engine-based propulsion systems for civil aviation and identify potential opportunities for collaboration where NASA involvement would be beneficial.

Validation and verification of RANS solvers for TUDa-GLR-OpenStage transonic axial compressor

“…However, V&V studies have not yet received as much attention in the turbomachinery community as in the external flow community. The last major V&V campaign for compressor flows dates back to the 1994 International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI) blind test on the NASA Rotor 37 (Denton, 1997), along with many individual validation efforts on other NASA compressor geometries (Suder, 2021) over the years. From today's perspective, the measurement accuracy of these data may no longer present state-of-the-art.…”

Advances in aerodynamics of power turbines for marine and aviation applications

“…In recent years, NASA has proposed a variable speed power turbine research project in the aerodynamic research project of the large civil tilt-rotor (LCTR) (Large Civil Tilt-Rotor). 7,8 The main purpose of the plan is to solve the problem of low-pressure turbines working efficiently at two or more different constant speeds. Take a tilt-rotor aircraft as an example.…”