A HIGH FIDELITY QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF HIGH PRESSURE TURBINE BLADES USING SURFACE CURVATURE AND GRADIENT-BASED ADJOINT

Gas turbine performance is highly dependent on the quality of the manufactured parts. Manufacturing variations in the parts can significantly alter the performance, especially efficiency and thus SFC. The legacy process is to accept variations within predefined profile tolerance limits and a few other qualitative parameters, mostly at a few, key two-dimensional aerofoil sections. With the widespread use of White light scans and other similar three-dimensional scans, this has improved to include the three-dimensional profile. The future however may lie with performance based quality assessment of manufactured parts, combined with quantitative surface quality assessment to implement an intelligent screening process for the parts. The adjoint method, typically used for shape optimization is adapted to provide a prediction of the impact on performance due to manufacturing variations. The work presented outlines a three stage quality assessment process for manufactured parts, involving three-dimensional profile tolerance based screening, followed by a surface curvature based screening and finally an Adjoint based performance prediction.