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A New Method for Generating Swirl Inlet Distortion for Jet Engine Research

Jet engines operate by ingesting incoming air, adding momentum to it, and exhausting it through a nozzle to produce thrust. Because of their reliance on an inlet stream, jet engines are very sensitive to inlet flow nonuniformities. This makes the study of the effects of inlet nonuniformities essential to improving jet engine performance. Swirl distortion is the presence of flow angle nonuniformity in the inlet stream of a jet engine. Although several attempts have been made to accurately reproduce swirl distortion profiles in a testing environment, there has yet to be a proven method to do so.

A new method capable of recreating any arbitrary swirl distortion profile is needed in order to expand the capabilities of inlet distortion testing. This will allow designers to explore how an engine would react to a particular engine airframe combination as well as methods for creating swirl distortion tolerant engines. The following material will present such a method as well as experimental validation of its effectiveness. / Master of Science

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/49545
Date07 June 2013
CreatorsHoopes, Kevin M.
ContributorsMechanical Engineering, O'Brien, Walter F. Jr., Lowe, K. Todd, Williams, Christopher B.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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