An Interactive Methodology for Axial Compressor Design Teaching

The implementation of new technology in the gas turbine industry is accelerating at a rate which demands increasing specialisation by its engineering design staff. Simultaneously, this industry has been adopting concurrent engineering practices to reduce product lead-time. Accordingly, the industry now requires its engineers to acquire early competence in a wide range of technological disciplines. In addition, the individual must have a thorough understanding of the impact of component design decisions on both other components and on the engine as a whole.Against this background, gas turbine educational providers must respond to these increasing demands with teaching programmes that facilitate a faster and deeper understanding of this very complex product. The ambition of the teacher, however, to adequately prepare the student will continue to be limited by time constraints within lecture courses. Hitherto, this has normally resulted in class worked examples which are necessarily narrow in scope and confined to a limited range of design cases.This paper describes a teaching methodology which is structured to facilitate in-depth understanding of the key interactions between aerodynamics, thermodynamics and mechanical integrity arising in axial compressor design optimisation. This is achieved interactively through a combination of lectures, a hand worked multistage preliminary compressor design, a series of personal computer based design optimisation workshops and a final collective design assessment.Copyright © 1999 by ASME