Data-Driven Analysis of Tortuous Gas Turbine Inlet Truncation to Reduce Computational Cost

What is it about?

To reduce airframe wetted area for drag reduction and the production of ever smaller aerial vehicles, complex inlet systems are required to deliver flow to the gas-turbine system. These inlets incur significant amounts of distortion and are costly to simulate due to the significant fluid volumes involved. It is crucial to understand the distortion profile through the inlet to predict the compression system response to the flow field. To reduce simulation costs, inlet systems are often truncated to minimize numerical domain sizes. The full effect of this decision has not been fully delineated. This paper shows that if the last inlet component is a radial-to-axial inlet, that this is the only component of the inlet that needs to be simulated.

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