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Trent900 Turbine and Compressor Design

Preliminary design, numerical optimization, and stage-matching of a high-pressure axial turbine and a 6-stage compressor group for a Joule-Brayton cycle, baselined on the A380's Trent 900 engine
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Mirko

Project Timeline

Feb 2025 - May-2025

HighlightS

  • Turbomachinery Power Balancing: Engineered a perfectly matched multistage environment, iteratively balancing the high-pressure turbine's work output with the compressor's power demand to achieve a unified, highly efficient shaft speed of 17,950 RPM
  • Thermochemical Combustion Modeling: Utilized NASA CEA to simulate the combustion of JET-A1 fuel and air
  • Algorithmic Loss Optimization: Executed an unconstrained numerical optimization framework using MATLAB, to successfully slash overall turbine stage losses by ~25%
  • Radial Equilibrium Analysis: Developed custom solvers for the NISRE equations, conducting complex trade studies between "Free Vortex" and "Constant Flow Angle" distributions to optimize spanwise blade loading from hub to tip
  • Airfoil Geometry Generation: Parameterized blade profiles using the Lieblein approach, translating optimal incidence and deviation angles into complete 2D geometrical blade geometries governed by NACA 4-digit thickness distributions
  • 6-Stage Compressor Sizing: Sized and validated a 6-stage axial compressor architecture to strictly avoid transonic shockwaves and prevent boundary layer separation, while integrating Lieblein profile and clearance loss models

SKILLS

MATLAB
NASA CEA
3D Flow Analysis
NISRE
Airfoil Generation

External Links

Project Report

Problem Statement

The objective is to design and analyze a high-pressure turbine stage, so the stage immediately after the combustion chamber and a high-pressure compressor group, which is the last one before the combustion chamber within a gas turbine that operates on a Joule-Brayton cycle. Turbine and compressor stages are mounted on a single shaft, this implies that the two have to rotate with the same velocity and so the goal is to ensure a balanced power output and RPM between the two. This means that all the power extracted from the turbine is used to rotate the compressor. In this project it has been chosen to take as a baseline the famous engine of the A380, such as the Trent 900 in order to make initial design guesses

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