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What We Do
The Center for Turbomachinery and Propulsion Research (CTPR) at Virginia Tech has provided research and educational service to industry and government agencies for nearly 30 years. The CTPR is comprised of 10 core faculty members and approximately 40 graduate students, which are distributed in the Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Departments. Some of the research topics currently being investigated include unsteady stator/rotor interactions in compressors, noise control in turbofans, combustion instabilities and adaptive controls, turbine component heat transfer for realistic flows, analysis methods for controlling performance variability and costs, rotor dynamics, magnetic bearings, and active flow control for reducing high-cycle fatigue.
Research
- Unsteady Behavior of a Tip-Leakage Vortex Produced by Simulated Stator/Rotor Interaction
- The Interaction of Free-Stream Turbulence with a Compressor Cascade
- Skin Friction Measurements in Scramjet Combustors
- Control of Inlet Noise from Turbofan Engines using Herschel-Qencke Waveguide Resonator
- Compressor Cascade Testing
- Active Flow Control for High-Cycle-Fatigue Reduction
- Active Flow Control in a Serpentine Inlet
- Simulations of Representative Exit Combustor Flows
- Heat Transfer Studies in Film-Cooled Transonic Turbine Blades
- Acoustic Characterization of Gas Turbine Flow Trains
- Practical Adaptive Controls for Combustion Processes
- Linear Modeling and Analysis of Thermoacoustic
- Instabilities in a Gas Turbine Combustor
- Magnetic Bearing Research
- Analysis Methods to Control Performance
- Variability and Costs in Turbine Engine Manufacturing
- Compressor Stage Response to Non-Uniform Flows
- Combustor-Turbine Interactions
Facilities
- Large scale wind tunnel with a unique gas turbine combustor simulator placed upstream of a scaled-up turbine vane (see schematic and picture)
- Transonic turbine cascade
- JT15D-1 turbofan engine that can generate up to 2500 lbs of thrust
- Moving wall compressor cascade
- High speed, variable speed motor drive for fluid film
bearing tests - Instrumentation used for testing includes the following: laser Doppler velocimetry, hot-wire anemometry, pressure probes, temperature probes, and an infrared camera
- Computational workstations including two SGI 02s and one Origin 2100 with four processors