SR123 - Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Principal Investigator: Danesh Tafti
Project Title: 
Syngas Particulate Deposition and Erosion at the Leading
Edge of a Turbine Blade with Film Cooling


Project Dates: August 2007 - August 2010
Area of Research: Aero-Heat Transfer
Project Fact Sheet:  
Performing Member Directory Information:  
Additional UTSR Research Projects: SR013, SR065, SR099, SR100, SR110, SR123
Faculty-Student Inventory: Co-Principal Investigator: Uri Vandsburger and W. NG
Collaborations:

GE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, Solar

Publications:

 

  • no publications reported

UTSR PERFORMING MEMBER DIRECTORY

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Research Projects Awarded : SR013, SR065, SR099, SR100, SR110, SR123

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


Experience
  • turbine aero and heat transfer, active combustion control, flow control, pressure distortion in compressors, internal and film cooling of turbine blades, computational fluid dynamics including detached and large eddy simulation techniques
Interest
Facilities
  • 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.


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