Numerical Investigations of a Tip Turbine Aerodynamic Design in a Propulsion System for VTOL Vehicles

Xin Xiang, Guoping Huang, Jie Chen, Lei Li and Weiyu Lu
Additional contact information
Xin Xiang: College of Energy and Power, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Guoping Huang: College of Energy and Power, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Jie Chen: College of Energy and Power, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Lei Li: College of Energy and Power, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Weiyu Lu: College of Energy and Power, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 15, 1-16

Abstract: High thrust and low specific fuel consumption (SFC) are important for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles. An effective way to decrease the SFC is to increase the bypass ratio (BPR) of the propulsion system. The air-driven fan (or fan-in-wing) has a very high bypass ratio and has proved to be successful in VTOL aircrafts. However, the tip turbine that extracts energy for the air-driven fan faces the low-solidity problem and performs inadequately. In this study, we developed a high-reaction method for the aerodynamic design of a tip turbine to solve the low-solidity problem. A typical tip turbine was selected and designed by both conventional and high-reaction methods. Three-dimensional flow fields were numerically simulated through a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The energy extraction rate was proposed to evaluate and display the energy extraction capability of the turbine. The results showed that the high-reaction turbine could solve the low-solidity problem and significantly increase the isentropic efficiency from approximately 80.0% to 85.6% and improve the isentropic work by 71.9% compared with the conventional method (from 10.28 kW/kg to 17.67 kW/kg).

Keywords: tip turbine; low-solidity turbine; aerodynamic analysis; vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/15/3003/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/15/3003/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:15:p:3003-:d:254599

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().