Introducing my conference paper, co-authored with Dr James Taylor of the Whittle Laboratory, on half-scale transonic compressor rapid testing rig.
Any aircraft engine technology must undergo high speed testing before being used on an engine. Traditionally, to test a high speed compressor as found in a modern jet engine would cost on the order of ten million dollars and take two to three years to complete. This is because the test rigs are extremely complex and demand huge amounts of power, which can amount of tens of megawatts. The immense cost of high speed testing leads to conservatism whereby only relatively mature technologies, being low-risk high-confidence, are sent to high speed testing to demonstrate their viability before integration into a product. Low-confidence radical new ideas are not tested at high speed. Instead, they undergo many stages of mockup testing and screening and many are dropped along the way.
We believe that by developing an experimental method whereby high speed testing can be performed extremely quickly and cheaply, we can allow a large number of novel concepts to be tested out directly at high speed, drastically reducing the cycle time of technology evolution in aero gas turbines.
A sequel to this paper, providing more technical detail and the latest results, is planned to be presented at the ASME Turbo Expo 2024.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2511/1/012007/meta
Half-scale transonic compressor rapid testing rig
T Wang and J V Taylor
Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 2511, XXVI Biennial Symposium on Measuring Techniques in Turbomachinery (MTT2622) 28/09/2022 – 30/09/2022 Pisa, Italy
Citation T Wang and J V Taylor 2023 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2511 012007
DOI 10.1088/1742-6596/2511/1/012007