Micro Gasturbine Integrated Design. Part 2: Compressor and Turbine

Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) is widely employed to enhance turbomachinery components efficiency. The aim of this work is to describe a complete tool for the aero-mechanical design of a radial inflow turbine and a centrifugal compressor. The high rotational speed of such machines and the high exhaust gas temperature (for the turbine) exposes blades to really high stresses and therefore the aerodynamics design has to be coupled with the mechanical one through an integrated procedure. This approach employs a fully 3D Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver for the aerodynamics and an open source Finite Element Analysis ( ) solver for the mechanical integrity assessment.Due to the high computational cost of both these two solvers, a metamodel, such as an artificial neural network, is employed to speed up the process. The interaction between two codes, the mesh generation and the post processing of the results are achieved via in-house developed scripting modules. The obtained results are widely presented and discussed.