On the design of single crystal turbine blades

After a short historical review, this paper recalls the successive steps of the life prediction of single crystal turbine blades, paying attention to a proper modelling of the material, to the mechanical aspects in the blades, and to the boundary conditions. The code built around the FE solver ZeBuLoN is now able to predict crack initiation by post-processing of the 3D elasto-viscoplastic computations.