Cooling Model Calibration in a Collaborative Turbine Preliminary Design Process Using the NASA Energy Efficient Engine - Part I: 0D Performance Modeling

Abstract

Under the NASA Energy Efficient Engine (E3) program, two high pressure turbines (HPTs) were separately developed and tested by General Electric (GE) and Pratt & Whitney (P&W). Despite the corresponding NASA E3 design reports and several subsequent publications related to these HPTs, there is still no uniform and consistent data base, leading to the absence of some essential parameters. Therefore, 0D performance models of the NASA E3 HPTs were generated based on the available literature. The performance results agree well with the literature data and will be presented. Moreover, a well-known turbine cooling modeling approach is calibrated using the 0D performance models and further 1D turbine models, which were created in a collaborative process documented in this work and an accompanying paper. This is crucial since the predicted coolant mass flows significantly affect the gas turbine efficiency. Based on the obtained calibration results, a simplified turbine cooling model is also derived and calibrated in this paper, being applicable for performance studies in the early phase of preliminary design. In order to quantify the error due to simplification, both the original and the simplified turbine cooling model are applied in two parametric studies.