TERTS: A Generic Real-Time Gas Turbine Simulation Environment

Abstract

Real-time simulation of gas turbine engine performance is used in a variety of aerospace applications. For simulation of propulsion system performance in flight-simulators, fidelity requirements become increasingly stringent. Significant improvements in simulation fidelity can be obtained when using thermodynamic models instead of the customary (piece-wise) linear real-time models. However, real-time thermodynamic models require sophisticated methods to efficiently solve the model equations on a real-time basis with sufficient speed. NLR has developed the ‘Turbine Engine Real-Time Simulator’ (TERTS) generic real-time engine simulation environment for full thermodynamic simulation of various gas turbine engine configurations. At NLR’s National Simulator Facility (NSF), research is performed on pilot-in-the-loop simulation of complex aircraft and helicopter configurations such as thrust-vectoring and Integrated Flight Propulsion Control (IFPC) concepts. For this application, high-fidelity real-time gas turbine models are required. TERTS has an efficient method for solving the engine model equations real-time. The system is implemented in Matlab-Simulink®, which offers advantages in terms of control system modeling flexibility. With TERTS, detailed thermodynamic real-time engine models can easily be implemented in NSF providing an excellent means to analyze a variety of engine effects on pilot-in-the-loop aircraft performance. In this paper the TERTS modeling environment will be described including the numerical solutions used to comply with the real-time requirements. A TERTS model of a military afterburning turbofan will be presented including simulation results.

Transient Behavior in Variable Geometry Industrial Gas Turbines: A Comprehensive Overview of Pertinent Modeling Techniques

“…Variety of commercial and limited use in-house built software have been employed in the literature for transient modeling and validation of the developed models, i.e., GateCycle [ 40 , 45 ], DESTUR [ 26 ], GETRAN [ 58 , 219 ], TURBOMATCH [ 51 , 220 ], AMESim [ 42 ], Thermoflow [ 7 ], DYNGEN [ 32 , 221 ]. TERTS [ 222 ], TURBOTRANS [ 223 , 224 ], and FORTRAN based programs [ 50 , 51 , 206 , 225 ].…”

Computational Simulation of PT6A Gas Turbine Engine Operating with Different Blends of Biodiesel—A Transient-Response Analysis

“…Our computational approach for the transient response simulation of a gas turbine engine operating with blends of biodiesel is similar to the ones in References [7,20,22,27], where aero-thermodynamical descriptions of gas turbine engines have been done. In contrast to those approaches, we consider the gas dynamics, which are the application of the mass, momentum and energy balances at every component of the gas turbine engine.…”

Joint Steady State and Transient Performance Adaptation for Aero Engine Mathematical Model

“…Aero-engine mathematical models play important roles in the R&D stage, and they are used widely in performance simulation [1], [2], control and health management system design [3]- [6] and so on. Among many types of models, component level models (CLMs) are preferred because they are applicable to large envelopes and can calculate unmeasurable performance parameters [7]- [10].…”