Development of a performance estimation tool for gas turbine engine centrifugal compressors

A preliminary design tool has been created to aid in the design and development of a centrifugal flow compressor impeller for a gas turbine engine. The design tool requires basic compressor design point geometry which could be obtained from simple calculations during the preliminary design phase of a gas turbine engine. Using this information, the design tool is able to estimate the compressor map. Elements from several models are incorporated in the design tool, most notably the impeller two-zone model for the construction of the compressor map at higher rotational speeds. To complete the map, the developed tool utilizes a low speed extrapolation technique to estimate low speed characteristics. The two-zone model utilizes few empirical correlations, however those used represent the most appropriate available. Furthermore, the design tool estimates the gas turbine performance based upon the design point data of the compressor, most notably the design pressure ratio and design mass flow rate. From this, component matching calculations are performed to estimate the gas turbine performance over a range of mass flow rates and rotational speeds.;The tool was validated against several test impellers obtained in the literature and also against a computational fluid dynamics study. The design tool is useful for synthesis of a compressor map which is required for the estimation of off-design engine performance at the preliminary design phase. One of the strengths of the design tool is that it allows for compressor characteristics estimation without the requirement for more complex streamline curvature or computational fluid dynamics studies. Overall, the developed tool showed good agreement between the developed compressor maps and actual compressor maps obtained in the literature. Furthermore, the design tool showed good agreement in the overall engine performance calculations when compared to more popular gas turbine engine performance estimation packages.