Development And Implementation Of Interactive / Visual Software For Simple Aircraft Gas Turbine Design

This paper describes a versatile, user-friendly, and easy to understand software suite that has been developed for analysis and design of a simple turbojet engine. The software has been class room tested for several semesters and it was very well received by the students. Introduction The school of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University offers MAE 4243, “Gas Power Systems”, as a required course for the Aerospace Engineering degree and an elective course for the Mechanical Engineering degree. Student use of software to analyze and design gas turbine systems has been an important part of this course since 1988. Use of software has been particularly important in the “design project” phase of the course. The software in use for many years was developed in the DOS environment and lacked many of the ease-of-use features now commonly available in MS Windows style programs. In addition, the source code for the program was not available to allow faculty and students to correct perceived weaknesses in the program. The primary goal of this project was to develop MS Windows based software: