Development of a simple tool able to study flight cycles gas turbine performance and emissions

Abstract During flight cycles, engine conditions may vary drastically from the design ones. Particularly, the high-security standard and the necessity to reduce emissions, have led to a continuous attention to the efficiency in all flight conditions. The objective of the present study is to develop a quick and easy way to analyze and investigate an aero-engine performance during different flight cycle conditions. Firstly, taking into consideration the GE 90 engine and its design characteristics, with the help of the in-house software ESMS (Energy System Modular Solver), many different flight conditions are tested, varying TIT, altitude, and Mach number independently. A big effort has been dedicated to this preliminary phase in order to get a perfect convergence for all the circumstances. Secondly, the aim was to adopt a wide-ranging approach to the problem: results have been stored and a sort of mapping has been created for that particular engine. This has allowed the final user to reproduce any flight cycle and to get the results in terms of thermodynamic parameters, as well as power and fuel consumption, without the necessity to run the code for each scenario. Time is drastically reduced and this lets the user quickly change input parameters to obtain the desired results. Thirdly, using a correlation, emissions, and in particular the emission index parameter of NOx, has been evaluated for all the flight point simulated. This procedure has been applied to a common flight path for the GE 90 engine and results have been compared to the nominal ones, proving the robustness of the software and the solidity of the procedure.