Design and Test of a Highly Loaded Single-Stage High Pressure Turbine

Abstract

For the small to medium thrust range of modern aero engines, highly loaded single-stage HP turbines facilitate an attractive alternative to a more conventional 2-stage HPT architecture. Within the German government funded LUFO-3 programme "Transonic Single Stage High-Pressure Turbine", a substantial activity towards the development and test of supersonic aerodynamic technology for single stage turbines was launched in 2003. This paper describes fundamental aerodynamic concept studies and related cascade experiments in support of a future highly loaded high-pressure turbine architecture. Details of the first out of two builds featuring an engine representative single-stage HPT is described in detail. Focus will be on instrumentation design, selected results from performance, area traverse and unsteady blade surface pressure measurements and the comparison of experiments with numerical simulations. The successfully completed test campaign confirms the existence of an aerodynamically efficient design of a highly loaded HPT, thereby enabling a competitive building block for a small to medium size engine concept.