Detailed Aerodynamic Design Optimization of an RLV Turbine

A task was developed at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) to improve turbine aerodynamic performance through the application of advanced design and analysis tools. There are four major objectives of this task: 1) to develop, enhance, and integrate advanced turbine aerodynamic design and analysis tools; 2) to develop the methodology for application of the analytical techniques; 3) to demonstrate the benefits of the advanced turbine design procedure through its application to a relevant turbine design point; and 4) to verify the optimized design and analysis with testing. The turbine chosen on which to demonstrate the procedure was a supersonic design suitable for a reusable launch vehicle (RLV). The hot gas path and blading were redesigned to obtain an increased efficiency over the baseline. Both preliminary and detailed designs were considered. The subject of the current paper is the optimization of the blading. To generate an optimum detailed design, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), response surface Copyright 2001 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. No copyright is asserted in the United States under Title 17, U.S. Code. The U.S. Government has a royalty-free liscense to exercise all rights under the copyright claimed herein for Governmental Purposes. All other rights are reserved by thecopyright owner methodology (RSM), and neural nets (NN) were used. The goal of the demonstration was to increase the total-tostatic efficiency, tit-s, of the turbine by eight points over the baseline design. The predicted rv-s of the optimized design was 10 points higher than the baseline.