Virtual Gas Turbines Part I: A Top-Down Geometry Modeling Environment for Turbomachinery Application

Abstract

The gas turbine engine design involves multidisciplinary, multifidelity iterative design-analysis processes. These highly intertwined processes are nowadays incorporated in automated design frameworks to facilitate high-fidelity, fully coupled, large-scale simulations. The most tedious and time-consuming step in such simulations is the construction of a common geometry database that ensures geometry consistency at every step of the design iteration, is accessible to multidisciplinary solvers, and allows system-level analysis. This paper presents a novel design-intent-driven geometry modeling environment that is based on a top-down feature-based geometry model generation method. The geometry features in this modeling environment are organized in a turbomachinery feature taxonomy. They produce a tree-like logical structure representing the engine geometry, wherein abstract features outline the engine architecture, while lower-level features define the detailed geometry. This top-down flexible feature-tree arrangement enables the design intent to be preserved throughout the design process, allows the design to be modified freely, and supports the design intent variations to be propagated throughout the geometry model automatically. The application of the proposed feature-based geometry modeling environment is demonstrated by generating a whole-engine computational geometry model. This geometry modeling environment provides an efficient means of rapidly populating complex turbomachinery assemblies. The generated engine geometry is fully scalable, easily modifiable, and is re-usable for generating the geometry models of new engines or their derivatives. This capability also enables fast multifidelity simulation and optimization of various gas turbine systems.