The gas turbine engine design involves multi-disciplinary, multi-fidelity iterative design-analysis processes. These intertwined design processes are nowadays incorporated in automated design frameworks, which are specifically developed to perform high-fidelity, fully coupled, large-scale gas turbine simulations. The most tedious and time-consuming step, however, is to construct a common, high-fidelity, whole-engine geometry database that ensures geometry consistency at every step of design iteration, is accessible to multi-disciplinary solvers and allows performing system-level simulations.This paper presents a novel design-intent-driven geometry modelling environment that is based on a top-down feature-based geometry model generation method. In the proposed object-oriented environment, each feature entity possesses a separate identity, denotes an abstract geometry, and carries a set of assembly characteristics. These geometry features are organised in a turbomachinery feature taxonomy. The engine geometry is represented by a tree-like logical structure of geometry features, wherein abstract features outline the engine topology, and it is filled by the finer and more detailed geometry features. This top-down flexible arrangement of feature-tree enables the design intent to be preserved throughout the design process and ensures the freedom of design modification. Therefore, any change of design intent is adapted throughout the feature-tree geometry of an engine.The application of the proposed feature-based geometry modelling environment is demonstrated by generating a whole-engine computational geometry. This geometry modelling environment provides an efficient means of rapidly populating complex turbomachinery assemblies. Such computational geometry is fully scalable, easily modifiable and hence is re-usable for generating the geometry models of new engines or their derivatives. This capability also enables fast multi-fidelity simulation and optimisation of various gas turbine systems.

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

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2021/volume/84898

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