Seminar: NASA Engine Icing Research

Phil Jorgenson, NASA Glenn

All dates for this event occur in the past.

N056 Scott Lab
N056 Scott Lab
201 W. 19th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract:

The occurrence of ice accretion within commercial high bypass aircraft turbine engines has been reported by airlines under certain atmospheric conditions. Engine anomalies have taken place at high altitudes that have been attributed to ice crystal ingestion by the engine. The ice crystals can result in degraded engine performance, loss of thrust control, compressor surge or stall, and flameout of the combustor. The Aviation Safety Program at NASA has taken on the technical challenge of a turbofan engine icing caused by ice crystals which can exist in high altitude convective clouds. The NASA engine icing project consists of an integrated approach with four concurrent and ongoing research elements, each of which feeds critical information to the next element. The project objective is to gain understanding of high altitude ice crystals by developing knowledge bases and test facilities for testing full engines and engine components. The first element is to utilize a highly instrumented aircraft to characterize the high altitude convective cloud environment. The second element is the enhancement of the Propulsion Systems Laboratory altitude test facility for gas turbine engines to include the addition of an ice crystal cloud. The third element is basic research of the fundamental physics associated with ice crystal ice accretion. The fourth and final element is the development of computational tools with the goal of simulating the effects of ice crystal ingestion on compressor and gas turbine engine performance. The NASA goal is to provide knowledge to the engine and aircraft manufacturing communities to help mitigate, or eliminate turbofan engine interruptions, engine damage, and failures due to ice crystal ingestion.

About the Speaker:

Philip Jorgenson has been working as an Aerospace Engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center since 1984.  He is in the Turbomachinery and Turboelectric Systems Branch.  Most of his career has been spent in the research and development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes and the application of those codes.  He began his career developing Rotor-Stator analysis codes to understand the effects of unsteady flow in the turbine of the High Pressure Fuel Turbopump of the Space Shuttle Main Engine.  He then developed an implicit unstructured grid flow solver to study internal viscous flows in complex geometries over a wide range of Mach numbers including flows that approach the incompressible limit.  He has developed central difference TVD and TVB schemes for time dependent and steady state problems.  Later he applied large-eddy-simulation codes to gain an understanding of basic physics in the area of computational aeroacoustics (CAA) specifically looking at noise source prediction of jets in the subsonic and supersonic flow regimes.  He is currently the Planning Lead of the Engine Icing technical challenge, a project under the NASA Aviation Safety Program, and his research is focused on modeling of ice crystal ingestion and its effects on the fan-core and low pressure compression system and the overall engine performance.

Hosted by Professor Mike Benzakein