Abstract
The gas turbine engine design involves multi-disciplinary, multi-fidelity iterative design-analysis processes. These highly intertwined processes are nowadays incorporated in automated design frameworks to facilitate high-fidelity, fully coupled, large-scale simulations. The most tedious and time-consuming step in such simulations is the construction of a common geometry database that ensures geometry consistency at every step of the design iteration, is accessible to multi-disciplinary solvers and allows system-level analysis.
This paper presents a novel design-intent-driven geometry modelling environment that is based on a top-down feature-based geometry model generation method. In the proposed object-oriented environment, each feature entity possesses a separate identity, denotes an abstract geometry, and carries a set of characteristics. These geometry features are organised in a turbomachinery feature taxonomy. The engine geometry is represented by a tree-like logical structure of geometry features, wherein abstract features outline the engine architecture, while the detailed geometry is defined by lower-level features. This top-down flexible arrangement of feature-tree enables the design intent to be preserved throughout the design process, allows the design to be modified freely and supports the design intent variations to be propagated throughout the geometry automatically.
The application of the proposed feature-based geometry modelling environment is demonstrated by generating a whole-engine computational geometry. This geometry modelling environment provides an efficient means of rapidly populating complex turbomachinery assemblies. The generated engine geometry is fully scalable, easily modifiable and is re-usable for generating the geometry models of new engines or their derivatives. This capability also enables fast multi-fidelity simulation and optimisation of various gas turbine systems.
Filtering items of mass distraction: Top-down biases against distractors are necessary for the feature-based carry-over to occur
