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Turbomachinery • Combustor • Flow Physics • Heat
Transfer
Data Acquisition
Turbomachinery
Facilities
Eleven turbomachinery facilities and laboratories are located in
the ERB. Fundamental and applied research to advance compressor
and turbine component technology for aeronautical gas turbine engines
is conducted in the facilities. Both axial- and radial-type machinery
are studied. Research is focused on improved understanding of steady
and unsteady aerodynamics, flow physics, and modeling and advanced
numerical flow code development and validation. Research experiments
utilize advanced instrumentation systems such as hot-wire anemometry
and laser diagnostics where detailed flow data is obtained on a
nonintrusive basis.
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Combustor Facilities
There are fifteen combustor and aerochemistry technology test facilities
and laboratories within the ERB. Fundamental and applied research
is aimed at advancing the technology of the combustion processes
of aeronautical gas turbine engines and advanced space transportation
concepts. Research is focused on providing improved understanding
of chemical kinetics of reacting flows, heat transfer phenomena,
advanced high-temperature materials, low NOx combustion, and code
development and validation.
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Flow Physics Facilities
Eight aerodynamic flow physics technology facilities are located
in the ERB. These facilities are used to conduct research advancing
the understanding of subsonic-to-supersonic flow physics phenomena
fundamental to ducted wall-bound flows. Research involves the development,
assessment, and application of computational fluid dynamics tools
for ducted flows, and for the acquisition and analysis of experimental
measurements of flows in inlets, ducts, and nozzles. Typically,
testing is performed to define basic flow properties, to predict
and validate component performance, and to investigate specific
phenomena including shock systems, boundary layers, bleeds, diffusion,
separated flows, heat transfer, cooling, spillage, acoustics, and
stability.
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Heat Transfer Technology
Six aeropropulsion heat transfer technology facilities are located
in the ERB. These facilities provide testing capability for experiments
to advance fundamental understanding of the heat transfer process
and to contribute to the predictive capability for heat transfer
in aeronautical and space propulsion systems. Research in these
facilities centers on gas turbine-related heat transfer with special
emphasis placed on gas path aero/heat transfer.
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Data Acquisition
The ERB facility consists of many different test cells. The test cells are categorized into four broad areas: Turbomachinery, Flow Physics, Combustors, and Heat Transfer. The test cells in each look at different aspects of these areas. However, the data acquisition system in each test cell consists of two basic components, which are the same for all test cells – an analog steady state acquisition system and a pressure measurement system. In addition, a portable transient data acquisition system can be provided upon request.
- Analog Steady State Data System – Escort
Escort, the analog steady state data acquisition system, uses a DEC Alpha microprocessor to provide:
- An X window base system
- Real time on-line acquisition of analog signals
- Conversion of raw 10 Hz filtered digitized Neff data to engineering units
- Computed performance calculations, which can be displayed in a variety of tabular and graphical formats
- Limited checking on all selected channels
- 1 second update rate
Escort can stand alone to meet all secure test requirements or it can be connected to a central processing cluster, which facilitates software application development, downloading of software, uploading and storage of facility tables, post processing of data and transmitting of data to a data collector for archival storage. Please see the Test Cell (listed below) you are interested in to find out the unique characteristics of the Escort system in that test cell.
- Pressure System
ESP is an off the shelf electronically scanned pressure system. The system consists of numerous 32 port, rack mounted modules from +/-2.5 PSID to +500 PSID, located outside the test chamber. Each module has a check pressure to assure the module is performing correctly and can be calibrated in place using up to 5 highly accurate calibration pressures to maintain the overall system accuracy of +/-0.05% of range. This calibration is performed every 2 hours. Please see the Test Cell (listed below) you are interested in to find out how many channels and what ranges of ESP modules are typically provided for that test cell.
- Transient Data Systems
While ERB test cells do not have dedicated transient data systems, a portable system can be made available. The transient data system provides multi-channel high speed digitized acquisition of rapidly changing cyclic or non-periodic impulse type events. A typical portable system consists of:
- A front end of aliasing filters
- The ability to off loading the data by FTPing, in near real time, to either one of our computers or yours for post processing
- Up to 64 channels with a 16 Bit A/D per channel
- Throughput of a minimum of 800 Kilo samples per second
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