GAS TURBINE LABORATORY SEMINAR
DATE: Thursday, 16 February 2023
TIME: 4:00pm
LOCATION: 31-270
SPEAKER: James Braun, Research Assistant Professor, Purdue
TOPIC: Power Harvesting from Shock Waves: The Axial Bladeless Turbine
ABSTRACT:
In the past decade, pressure gain combustion research has promised over ten percentage points of increase in power plant thermal efficiency. The impact of a mere two percent increase in fuel efficiency for airplane engines would save over one billion dollars for the United States per year, not to mention potential reductions in size, weight, complexity, and cost of engines. However, to realize such potential gains, the turbine must be effectively coupled with the Rotating Detonation Combustor (RDC), whose exhaust conditions differ substantially from the inlet conditions of the current state-of-the-art turbines.
In this talk, a new type of turbine will be introduced, the wavy-shaped bladeless turbine. This is an energy conversion unit for the combined power extraction and thrust increase which can be employed in high subsonic to hypersonic flows, and especially suitable for rotating detonation combustors. The seminar will include the current state of bladeless turbines, their advantages and performance characteristics. We will also briefly review the characteristics of rotating detonation combustors. Finally, the concept is validated in a supersonic wind tunnel through high-frequency probe-based and optical measurements.
BIO:
James Braun graduated from the KU Leuven (Belgium) as a mechanical engineer. He performed a research master at the von Karman Institute for fluid dynamics (Belgium) in 2015 within the Aerospace and Aeronautics department. His thesis was on the ‘Characterization of complex multi-physics flow in rotating detonation engines” for which he won the Prince Alexandre de Belgique price for the best presentation. He obtained his PhD from Purdue University (USA) in 2019 entitled “power harvesting from shock waves: the axial bladeless turbine”. In 2018, he was awarded the AIAA Gordon C Oates Air Breathing propulsion graduate award. He was an ORISE postdoctoral researcher in 2019 and is currently a research assistant professor at Purdue University.