Clarkson University
Clarkson University 's School of Engineering has 72 faculty members organized into departments of chemical engineering, mechanical and aeronautical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and electrical and computer engineering. Many of these professors have expertise and facilities applicable to gas turbines.
Research areas include experimental, computer modeling, and theoretical work on selection of shapes for minimization of drag, turbulence, convective heat transfer along turbine blades, particle transport and sticking, structures and vibration, welding, fatigue and fracture of materials, corrosion and oxidation, casting and solidification, adhesion, flexible manufacturing and robotics, deposition of refractory films, plasma and laser processing, polymer processing and composites, control theory and practice, thermodynamics and reaction kinetics, and electric power transmission and insulation. Our Chemistry Department is noted for its pioneering work on generation of monodispersed particles of all types, including ceramics, polymers, semiconductor compounds, and composites.
Facilities include scanning electron microscopes with energy dispersive x-ray spectrometry, transmission electron microscopes, scanning tunneling electron microscopes, ion scattering spectroscopy, x-ray diffractometry, optical and infrared microscopy, plasma generators, particle sizing instrumentation, lasers of many types and sizes, molecular beam epitaxy equipment, chemical vapor deposition equipment, laser Doppler velocimeters, particle sizing equipment of all types, clean room, ice formation and handling equipment, wind tunnels, image processing equipment, polymer and composite processing and characterization equipment, a variety of welding and metallographic equipment, electrochemical corrosion instrumentation, mechanical properties equipment of many types and sizes, adhesive application and testing equipment, unique centrifuge processing apparatus, etc. We have access to a wide variety of computers and software, including several thousand PC's, several hundred work stations, in-house mainframes, and easy free access to supercomputing and massively parallel computing machines elsewhere.
As an AGTSR subcontract recipient, Clarkson University is performing research on the design of turbine endwalls to reduce total pressure loss and heat transfer in gas turbines. Under the direction of Professor Ronald S. LaFleur, a cascade wind tunnel is being used to model secondary flow phenomena in a high-pressure stator such as a nozzle vane or second stage stator. An innovative technique called “the iceformation method” is being used to allow the flow to vary the endwall geometries directly. The secondary flow losses and surface heat transfer are altered as the shape changes. The flow designs the surface and the surface alters the flow in the adaptive design process. The geometries are controlled by the flow and thermal conditions at the cascade inlet.
A liquid nitrogen heat exchanger system is being developed to grow an initial ice layer and support the ice layer when the cascade airflow melts and shapes the surface. The process reaches the steady state of a smoothly contoured wall. Under certain thermal and flow conditions, the steady stage geometry is a minimum pressure loss and heat transfer shape.
The pressure load and loss contours for the iceform and a flat endwall baseline geometries will be measured in Clarkson's wind tunnel and in General Electric's wind tunnel using a traversed five-hole pressure probe. The heat transfer contours will be calculated from steady state ice contours using image processing hardware and a three-dimensional heat conduction computer code. The teaming of Clarkson University and General Electric enhances the applicability of results. It is expected that the research will yield new information and capability for advanced gas turbine design. |