What is it about?
We needed to measure the pressures and temperatures in front of and behind the fan of a jet engine, so we built a set of "rakes" which could be moved around the fan duct. This paper explains how we decided where to place the individual probes on the rakes and how closely-spaced the measurements had to be when we operated the system.
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Why is it important?
We learned some important lessons about designing this type of rake system. Since we are not aware of any previous publications about this aspect of rake system design, we felt it important to share our findings. This work supports our project to study "boundary layer ingestion", which is a technology that could reduce aircraft fuel consumption 3-5% or more.
Perspectives
We in the aerospace industry have been measuring flows using rakes for many years, so you might think there was not much more to learn about the topic. I found it interesting to explore different techniques of averaging and integrating the results. In the end we found some useful results which hopefully will save others time and effort in their rake designs. Plus it was fun to "muck around" in Fortran to do this study.
John Wolter
NASA
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Development of a Rotating Rake Array for Boundary-Layer-Ingesting Fan-Stage Measurements, July 2017, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2017-4636.
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