Gas turbine blade flow analysis comparison using CFD and Wind Tunnel

General Electric turbine blades are commonly used in many industrial gas turbine applications. The blade made by GE is twisted along its length so its modeling is quite difficult. The blade has been designed using reverse engineering technique in which different scans of the actual model are taken and then by merging these scans in Geomagic Studio software, analytical model is made. The remaining difficulty of generating grid is done in Gridgen. In order to manufacture the blade, a mold of plaster of paris was prepared using actual blade model as pattern. Then fiber glass is poured into the mold to make the physical model for testing. The flow analysis was done experimentally in a Wind Tunnel at low velocities so as to avoid the blade stall and vibrational effects. The coefficient of drag and lift are then computed using gas dynamics theory. While CFD analysis was done using 3D domain and laminar flow approximations to obtain the results for lift and drag coefficients. The results of CFD simulations are then compared with the experimentally calculated data. There is a slight difference in the compared results owing to the fact that ideal conditions could not be maintained experimentally.