FETC, Allison Engine Company, UTRC Pratt & Whitney, Solar GT, Inc., University of Arkansas

• Flow Actuation, Controller, and Materials Development for Gas Turbine Systems - DOE Advanced Gas Turbine Systems Research-Combustion Technology Workshop IV, Atlanta, GA, March 5-7, 1997
• Coupled Multiple Jet Excitation, AIAA-97-0075 - Paper Presented at the 35th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, NV, 1997
• Neural Network Estimation of the Flow Field Structure of Spatially Excited Jets, AIAA-97-0073 - Paper Presented at the 35th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, NV 1997
• Actuation Methodologies and Actuator Materials for Combustion Control - DOE Advanced Turbine Systems-Annual Program Review, Washington, DC, November 7-8, 1996
• Flow and Combustion Control: Actuation Methodologies and High Temperature Actuator Materials - DOE Advanced Gas Turbines Systems Research-Combustion Technology Workshop III, Lake Arrowhead, CA, March 19-22,1996
• Actuation Methodologies and Actuator Materials for Combustion Control - DOE Advanced Turbine Systems-Annual Program Review, Morgantown, WV, October 17-18, 1995
• Active Combustion Devices - DOE Advanced Turbine Systems Research-Combustion Technology Workshop II, Indianapolis, IN, March 26-29, 1995
• Actuators for Combustion Control-New Approaches and Materials - DOE Advanced Turbine Systems-Annual Program Review, Arlington, VA , November
  9-11, 1994
• Advanced Combustion Technologies for Gas Turbine Power Plants - DOE Advanced Turbine Systems-Combustion Technology Workshop, Nashville, TN, February 23-25, 1994
• Advanced Combustion Technologies for Gas Turbine Power Plants - U.S. Dept.
  of Energy Joint Contractors Meeting-Advanced Turbine Systems Conference, Morgantown, WV, August 3-5, 1993

Performing Member Contact:

Danesh Tafti, Associate Professor

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
114 Randolph Hall, Mechanical Engineering Department
Blacksburg, VA 24061
540-231-9975 /FAX 540-231-9100
dtafti@vt.edu

• Virginia Tech's Center for Turbomachinery and Propulsion Research includes faculty from the Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments. The Center is actively working on projects concerned with combustion instabilities, turbine aero and heat transfer issues, unsteady stator/rotor interactions, distortion effects in compressor performance, turbine engine noise, analyses methods for controlling performance variability, rotor dynamics, magnetic bearings, and active flow control for reducing high-cycle fatigue.

  The research projects use experimental facilities such as a heated transonic turbine blade cascade with cryogenic cooling to achieve high density ratios between the coolant and hot gas flows, a transonic compressor cascade, a moving wall compressor cascade, and a number of low speed wind tunnels with linear airfoil cascades. Rotor dynamics is studied using various facilities, which include a variable speed motor drive capable of 14,000 rpm for identification of fluid film bearing characteristics. Test rigs for combustion studies include a full scale combustor capable of high pressure combustion. In addition to the facilities mentioned, there is an airport laboratory that houses an operational JT15D-1 turbofan engine that can generate up to 2500 lbf of thrust. Instrumentation used for these studies include laser Doppler velocimeters, hot-wire anemometers, Schlieren systems, pressures probes, fast-responding heat flux sensors, thermal liquid crystals, and infrared thermography. In addition to a number of workstations and PCs, computational facilities include a cluster of 1,100 Apple G5s capable of 10.3 trillion operations per second, which makes the Virginia Tech Terascale Computing Facility the third-fastest machine in the world.