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Turbine engine efficiency modeling depends on many parameters related to fluid dynamics and heat transfer. Many of these parameters change dynamically once the engine enters service and begins to experience surface degradation. This thesis presents a validation of the design and operation of an accelerated testing facility for the study of foreign deposit layers typical to the operation of land-based gas turbines. It also reports on the use of this facility in an effort to characterize the change in thermal resistance on the surface of turbine blades as deposits accumulate. The facility was designed to produce turbine deposits in a 4-hour test that would simulate 10,000 hours of turbine operation. This is accomplished by matching the net foreign particulate throughput of an actual gas turbine. Flow Mach number, temperature and particulate impingement angle are also matched. Validation tests were conducted to model the ingestion of foreign particulate typically found in the urban environment. The majority of this particulate is ceramic in nature and smaller than 10µm in size, but varies in size up to 80µm. Deposits were formed for flow Mach number and temperature of 0.3 and 1150°C respectively, using air plasma sprayed (APS) thermal barrier coat (TBC) material coupons donated from industry. These conditions are typical of a modern, first stage nozzle. Investigations over a range of impingement angles yielded samples with deposit thicknesses from 50 to 200µm in 4-hour, accelerated-service simulations. Above a threshold temperature, deposit thickness was dependent primarily upon particle concentration. Test validation was achieved using direct comparison with deposits from service hardware. Deposit characteristics affecting blade heat transfer via convection and conduction were assessed. Surface topography analysis indicated that the surface structure of the generated deposits were similar to those found on actual turbine blades. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and x-ray spectroscopy analyses indicated that the deposit microstructures and chemical compositions were comparable to turbine blade deposit samples obtained from industry. A roadmap for the development of a theoretical model of thermal resistance using the SEM scan is presented. Thermal resistance experiments conducted with deposit samples indicate that a general decrease in thermal resistance occurs as the samples are exposed to operating conditions in the accelerated testing facility. This is likely due to sintering effects within the TBC dominating any thermal resistance increase arising from deposition. Recommendations for future research into the interaction between TBC sintering and deposit evolution are presented.

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A recent development in the design of control system for a jet engine is to use a suitable, fast and accurate model running on board. Development of linear models is particularly important as most engine control designs are based on linear control theory. Engine control performance can be significantly improved by increasing the accuracy of the developed model. Current state-of-the-art is to use piecewise linear models at selected equilibrium conditions for the development of set point controllers, followed by scheduling of resulting controller gains as a function of one or more of the system states. However, arriving at an effective gain scheduler that can accommodate fast transients covering a wide range of operating points can become quite complex and involved, thus resulting in a sacrifice on controller performance for its simplicity. This thesis presents a methodology for developing a control oriented analytical linear model of a jet engine at both equilibrium and off-equilibrium conditions. This scheme requires a nonlinear engine model to run onboard in real time. The off-equilibrium analytical linear model provides improved accuracy and flexibility over the commonly used piecewise linear models developed using numerical perturbations. Linear coefficients are obtained by evaluating, at current conditions, analytical expressions which result from differentiation of simplified nonlinear expressions. Residualization of the fast dynamics states are utilized since the fast dynamics are typically outside of the primary control bandwidth. Analytical expressions based on the physics of the aerothermodynamic processes of a gas turbine engine facilitate a systematic approach to the analysis and synthesis of model based controllers. In addition, the use of analytical expressions reduces the computational effort, enabling linearization in real time at both equilibrium and off-equilibrium conditions for a more accurate capture of system dynamics during aggressive transient maneuvers. The methodology is formulated and applied to a separate flow twin-spool turbofan engine model in the Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) platform. The fidelity of linear model is examined by validating against a detailed nonlinear engine model using time domain response, the normalized additive uncertainty and the nu-gap metric. The effects of each simplifying assumptions, which are crucial to the linear model development, on the fidelity of the linear model are analyzed in detail. A case study is performed to investigate the case when the current state (including both slow and fast states) of the system is not readily available from the nonlinear simulation model. Also, a simple model based control is used to illustrate benefits of using the proposed modeling approach.

Scanning Laser Epitaxy (SLE) is a new layer-by-layer additive manufacturing process being developed in the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory at Georgia Tech. SLE allows for the fabrication of three-dimensional objects with specified microstructure through the controlled melting and re-solidification of a metal powder placed atop a base substrate. This dissertation discusses the work done to date on assessing the feasibility of using SLE to both repair single crystal (SX) turbine airfoils and manufacture functionally graded turbine components. Current processes such as selective laser melting (SLM) are not able to create structures with defined microstructure and often have issues with warping of underlying layers due to the high temperature gradients present when scanning a high power laser beam. Additionally, other methods of repair and buildup have typically been plagued by crack formation, equiaxed grains, stray grains, and grain multiplication that can occur when dendrite arms are separated from their main dendrites due to remelting. In this work, it is shown that the SLE process is capable of creating fully dense, crack-free equiaxed, directionally-solidified, and SX structures. The SLE process, though, is found to be currently constrained by the cumbersome method of choosing proper parameters and a relative lack of repeatability. Therefore, it is hypothesized that a real-time feedback control scheme based upon a robust offline model will be necessary both to create specified defect-free microstructures and to improve the repeatability of the process enough to allow for multi-layer growth. The proposed control schemes are based upon temperature data feedback provided at high frame rate by a thermal imaging camera. This data is used in both PID and model reference adaptive control (MRAC) schemes and drives the melt pool temperature during processing towards a reference melt pool temperature that has been found to give a desired microstructure in the robust offline model of the process. The real-time control schemes will enable the ground breaking capabilities of the SLE process to create engine-ready net shape turbine components from raw powder material.

A gas turbine engine design process was developed for the design of a common core engine family. The process considers initial and projected variant engine applications, likely technology maturation, and various sources of uncertainty when making initial core design considerations. A physics based modeling and simulation environment was developed to enforce geometric core commonality between the core defining design engine and a common core variant engine. The environment also allows for upgrade options and technology to be infused into the variant engine design. The relationships established in the model enable commonality to be implicitly enforced when performing simultaneous design space explorations of the common core design and all corresponding variant engine designs. A robust design simulation process was also developed, enabling probabilistic surrogate model representations of the common core engine family design space to be produced. The probabilistic models provide confidence interval performance estimates with a single function call for an inputted set of core and variant design settings and the uncertainty distribution shape parameter settings representative of an uncertainty scenario of interest. The unique form of the probabilistic surrogate models enables large numbers of common core engine family applications to be considered simultaneously, each being simulated under a unique uncertainty scenario. Implications of core design options can be instantaneously predicted for all engine applications considered, allowing for favorable common core design regions to be identified in a highly efficient manner.

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