Modeling and Simulation of Common Core Gas Turbine Engine Variant Applications

Abstract

The development of a clean sheet gas turbine engine program can be a multi-billion dollar undertaking. The decision to take on such a program can place the company at great risk. In order to distribute this capital risk among a large quantity of products, the engine core should be utilized across a family of products. However, common core engine variant designs must also achieve performance levels that are competitive and economically viable options for likely customers. Common engine core design decisions should be made with knowledge of how a candidate core definition will impact initial and future product applications. Implications must be drawn to estimate the impacts on performance, weight, and cost when employing a single core definition across a variety of likely product applications. This introduces an immense computational challenge. If commonality were enforced via post processing of simulation data, a large portion of the design space would not represent common core applications, making the associated data useless to the designer. Therefore, engine commonality should be implicitly imposed across the various product applications being considered. To further reduce the computational burden of simulating multiple applications, design space exploration of the core and corresponding variant applications must also be done in an efficient manner. This research aims to develop and demonstrate a computationally efficient method for modeling and simulating a variety of common core engine variant applications simultaneously. The modeling approach to enforce commonality will first be shown. Additionally, the method will be shown to enable design space exploration of multiple common core engine applications simultaneously. Through the use of surrogate models, the relationship between a common engine core definition and corresponding variant application will be captured in mathematical form. This mathematical relationship will then be duplicated for each product application, tying all applications to a single baseline engine core definition. The approach allows core design implications to be drawn instantaneously to each product application considered. After establishing the unique modeling and simulation approach, the method will be demonstrated for a multiple application common core design problem. The process will be used to arrive at an engine core definition that can be employed across multiple high bypass turbofan applications. In order to enumerate the amount of compromise made by employing a single baseline core definition across multiple applications, each resultant common core variant design will be compared to corresponding clean sheet designs selected for each individual application. The knowledge gained from this modeling and simulation approach allows the designer to make performance, weight, and cost trades efficiently across a family of products earlier in the development process.