Axial Turbine Aerodynamic Design of Small Heavy-Duty Gas Turbines

This study describes the aerodynamic design procedure for the axial turbines of a small heavy-duty gas turbine engine being developed by Doosan Heavy Industries. The design procedure mainly consists of three parts: namely, flowpath design, airfoil design, and 3D performance calculation. To design the optimized flowpath, through-flow calculations as well as the loss estimation are widely used to evaluate the effect of geometric variables, for example, shape of meridional plane, mean radius, blades axial gap, and hale angle. During the airfoil design procedure, the optimum number of blades is calculated by empirical correlations based on the in/outlet flow angles, and then 2D airfoil planar sections are designed carefully, followed by 2D B2B NS calculations. The designed planar sections are stacked along the spanwise direction, leading to a 3D surfaced airfoil shape. To consider the 3D effect on turbine performance, 3D multistage Euler calculation, single row, and multistage NS calculations are performed.