Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The gas turbine engine has envolved rapidly to provide a reliable and efficient business solution for global transportation. The engine design process is clearly a large contributor to this evolution. This process is highly iterative, multidisciplinary and complex in nature. The success of an engine depends on a carefully balanced design that best exploits the interactions between numerous traditional engineering disciplines such as aerodynamics and structures as well as lifecycle analysis of cost, manufacturability, serviceability and supportability. Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC) is the world leader in the design and manufacturing of small aero-engines. P&WC typically designs and develops 10-15 engines per years, which has resulted in a record 50 new engines certified over the past ten years. To continue this and to address new market requirements, advanced design and engine module design studies could reach 30 to 50 per years. The proposed program aims to deploy a fully automated and integrated P&WC Turbine System Optimizer ""TSO"" that is capable of finding the optimal balance between aerodynamic performance, cooling flows, durability, cost and weight in order to achieve the best product performance. The resulting ""TSO"" is expected to produce better-integrated results, while providing a step reduction in engine design elapsed time. A simplified version will be made available to universities in order to provide students with knowledge of trade-off between engine performance, weight and cost. The proposed program draws motivation from the vision at École de technologie supérieure (ETS), whose aim is to strengthen its expertise in propulsion systems through a strategic industrial partnership with P&WC in order to develop a new generation of engineers with greater knowledge in optimization and integration of the entire powerplant and aircraft system.