Power Balance Strategies in Steady-State Simulation of the Micro Gas Turbine Engine by Component-Coupled 3D CFD Method

Currently, an increasing number of designers have begun to pay attention to a new paradigm for evaluating the performance with full engine 3-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (3D CFD) simulations. Compared with the traditional component-based performance simulation method component-based performance simulation method ('component-matched' method), this novel 'component-coupled' method can evaluate the overall performance of the engine more physically and obtain more detailed flow field parameters simultaneously. Importantly, the power balance iteration should be introduced to the novel method to satisfy the constraints of the coaxial components for the gas turbine engine at steady state. By carrying out the 'component-matched' simulation and the 'component-coupled' simulation for a micro turbojet engine, the necessity of introducing the power balance iteration was discussed in this paper. The influence of steady-state co-working constraints on the engine performance was analysed and strategies for power balance iteration were proposed. To verify the capability and feasibility of this method, not only the co-working state but also the windmill state of the gas turbine engine were simulated by using the 3D CFD method considering power balance iteration. The results show that the power balance strategy proposed in this paper can converge the aerodynamic parameters as well as the power residual in a robust way.