Gas Turbine Engine Compressor Research Articles

Development of metal-matrix composite blading for gas-turbine engines.

Metal-matrix composite materials are of interest for aircraft gas-turbine engine compressor blading because they offer significant weight savings, resulting in increased aircraft payload and range. Design of these lightweight blades requires development of analytical techniques to determine the stresses and behavior of these anisotropic structures for both steady-state and vibratory loadings. An initial survey of composite material systems indicated that the most promising system for study was boron filament in an aluminum matrix. Tensile specimens of this material with 30 to 40 vol. % boron demonstrated specific strengths which exceeded that of conventional titanium by better than 50%. A simulated boronaluminum airfoil was produced containing unidirectional boron filaments which constituted 36 vol. % of the material. Testing indicated that the composite material airfoil had li times the torsional stiffness and better than twice the bending stiffness of a similar all-aluminum airfoil.

The thermal stability of gas turbine engine compressor blades made of glass-reinforced plastic

The thermal stability of gas turbine engine compressor blades made of glass-reinforced plastic

U.S. Patent Specifications

A gas turbine engine compressor blade, the blade being formed of synthetic, resin‐impregnated, cloth laminations bonded together and having an outwardly divergent root portion extending chord‐wise of the blade, said root portion having the outer divergent faces thereof forming angles of approximately 60 deg. with the base face thereof, the root portion having only six imperforate wedge‐shaped metal inserts of small wedge angle extending chord‐wise of the blade inter‐leaved with groups of said laminations and diverging away from the blade for the sum of their wedge angles to provide the root portion divergence, and means bonding on both sides, in the interior of the root portion, the inserts to adjacent laminations, at least some of the laminations extending spanwise of the blade and forming a part of the air impelling portion of the blade, the angle subtended by each insert being approximately 10 deg.