The Impact of Manufacturing Variability on Multi-Passage High Pressure Turbine Aerodynamics

© 2019, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved. This paper examines the impact of measured manufacturing variability on the three-dimensional aerodynamic performance of a high-pressure turbine (HPT) rotor. Blade geometries were measured at the end of a modern aviation gas turbine manufacturing line. The aerodynamic assessment was performed using single-and multi-passage three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes calculations. Analysis of the sampled blades demonstrates that for the lower half of the HPT rotor blade, the variability introduces linear changes in both the single-passage and multi-passage calculations. However, changes in the structure of the secondary flow near the tip of the HPT rotor blade is observed in some cases and causes non-linear variations in performance. Thus, the performance of the entire rotor row is not always a simple average of the performances of the individual blades that make up the row.