The flow in gas turbines exhibits a highly unsteady, complex and nonuniform manner, which presents two main challenges. Firstly, it introduces instrumentation errors, contributing to uncertainties when calculating one-dimensional performance metrics during rig or engine tests using fixed-location rakes. Secondly, it raises mechanical concerns, including high-cycle fatigue due to blade row interactions in turbomachines and thermal fatigue caused by hot-streaks at the combustor exit. Experimental characterisation of the flow nonuniformity in gas turbines is highly challenging due to the confined space and harsh environment for instrumentation. This paper presents recent efforts to address this issue by resolving the nonuniform flow in gas turbines using spatially under-sampled measurements. The proposed approach utilises discrete probe data and leverages a ‘Fourier-based approximation’ method developed by the author. The technique has undergone preliminary experimental validation involving reconstruction of the total pressure distribution in a multi-stage axial compressor and the total temperature field at the exit of the combustor and high-pressure turbine. Results show that, in the multi-stage axial compressor environment, reconstruction of inter-stage total pressure is achieved using a reduced dataset covering less than 20% of the annulus with reasonably good accuracy. The reconstructed total pressure yields almost identical mean total pressure values at all spanwise locations, with a maximum deviation of less than 0.02%. Additionally, reconstruction of the total temperature distribution at an engine-representative full annulus combustor is achieved using measurements at ten carefully selected circumferential locations. Results show that the reconstructed temperature field successfully captures the primary features associated with combustor exit temperature flow. The reconstructed temperature field yields excellent agreement in the magnitude of radial temperature distribution factor (RTDF) and overall temperature distribution factor (OTDF) predictions to the experiment, with a deviation of less than 0.5% for RTDF and less than 2.5% for OTDF. Lastly, reconstruction of the total temperature distribution at the exit of the GE E3 high-pressure turbine (HPT) is achieved using measurements at eight carefully selected circumferential locations. Results demonstrate remarkable robustness in resolving the temperature profile at the HPT exit with high fidelity, irrespective of the HPT inlet conditions. The initial validation results are promising, demonstrating that the new probe layout scheme and the Fourier-based approximation method enable effective characterisation of flow nonuniformity in gas turbines, thereby providing valuable insights into the complex flow of gas turbine engines.

Water vapour and particles in aero engine exhaust can give rise to condensation trails (contrails) in the wake of aircrafts, and recent studies suggest that persistent contrails and contrail cirrus account for circa 50% of the total aviation-derived radiative forcing (RF). The Schmidt-Appleman criterion is widely used to qualitatively predict the formation of contrails. The criterion indicates that the formation of contrails is affected by both aero engine exhaust and ambient air conditions and can therefore provide the theoretical basis to devise contrail mitigation strategies and further allows quantitative assessment of these strategies. This work focuses on water extraction from the aircraft engine exhaust for contrail mitigation. The fuel water emission index (${\rm{E}}{{\rm{I}}_{{{\rm{H}}_2}{\rm{O}}}}$) is one of the key factors that determines whether persistent contrails form or not. It indicates the amount of water produced for every kg of fuel burnt. Research has indicated that water extraction from the exhaust of the aero engine has been considered for Nitrogen oxides (NOx) reduction, but not for contrail mitigation. Assuming that water extraction is indeed possible, the emphasis of this work will therefore be on understanding how much water is needed to be extracted for contrail mitigation depending on the altitude and the relative humidity (RH), with the aim to carry out a meaningful study on the mitigation of persistent contrails and contrail cirrus to enable a fast and considerable reduction in aviation-derived RF.

The BLI (boundary layer ingestion) concept for propulsion seeks to improve the energy efficiency of aircraft propulsion. This is achieved by accelerating low momentum flow ingested from boundary layers and wakes developed over the fuselage through the fan. A major challenge that needs to be overcome to realise the benefits is that the fan needs to work efficiently in distorted flow. Understanding the effects of distortion on the aerodynamic performance and the distortion transfer through the fan is therefore essential to future designs. A BLI fan, designed at reduced scale, is used for analytic modelling and experiments in a rig designed for this purpose. The test rig replicates BLI conditions for a fan installed at the aircraft tail cone. An unsteady model that includes all blades and vanes of the fan, as well as the nacelle and the by-pass duct of the test rig is used for CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations. Test results are used to confirm that the CFD model is representative of the aerodynamics of the fan. The tests are conducted using varying fan operating conditions but also tests with an added distortion screen. Analysis results are then used to investigate the effects of distortion on the fan efficiency, as well as on the overall efficiency. The fan efficiency is found to be moderately decreased depending on the level of and extent of inlet circumferential distortion. In terms of overall energy efficiency, a net improvement over a similar fan in clean inlet flow is found.

Axial fans are vital accessories in aircraft ventilation systems, but, they may experience erosion from particulate flows, causing a decline in effectiveness over time. This study investigated the trajectories of two types of sand particles and erosion in an axial fan stage, considering the relative position of the blades facing the inlet guide vanes.

The movement of particles was simulated using an in-house code that implements a Lagrangian approach along with a stochastic particle-eddy interaction model. The flow field was solved separately and the flow data was transferred to the particle trajectory code. The finite element method allowed for the tracking of particles through the computational cells and accurate determination of their impact positions. A semi-empirical erosion correlation was used to evaluate the local erosion rates, mass removal, and geometry deterioration.

As a result, the rotor exhibits a high frequency of impacts and significant erosion on the leading edge of the blade, extending to the upper corner of the pressure side and blade tip, as well as the front of the suction side. In the inlet guide vane, the erosion is spread out along the entire pressure side but at lower erosion rates compared to the rotor blade. The erosion patterns obtained at different pitch-wise positions were cumulated to get better representation of erosion patterns. After being exposed to MIL-E5007E sand (0–1000 $\unicode{x03BC}$m) at the highest concentration for 10 hours, the blade experienced a reduction of a 0.29% in mass, a 0.45% decrease in tip chord, and a 0.23% increase in tip clearance. On the other hand, AC-coarse sand (0–200 μm) resulted in a 0.23% decrease in blade mass, a 0.4% reduction in tip chord, and a 0.16% increase in tip clearance.

The data that is available can be used to monitor the lifespan of axial fans of similar design and select appropriate coatings to protect against erosion.

In this paper, the results of an experimental investigation for a Y-shaped engine inlet are presented. The experiment is performed at subsonic flow conditions. The main focus is given to time-dependent total pressures measured at the aerodynamic interface plane. Distinctive frequencies carrying high energy contents of the fluctuating total pressures are given and the relation between time-dependent and time-average performance parameters is presented. The cross-correlation coefficients of the high frequency probe readings distributed through the aerodynamic interface plane are also investigated.

This study investigates the combustion characteristics (lean blowoff (LBO), flashback, and combustion instability) of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) using a two-staged combustor arranged in tandem. The combustor consists of a first (main) burner with an axial swirler and a second burner (afterburner) with a V-gutter bluff-body. The main burner utilises a constant flow rate of CH4/Air as reactants, while the afterburner operates on the combustion product from the first burner, additional dilution air, and one of the six liquid test fuels (Jet-A, A-2, C-1, C-5, C-9, and JP-8/HRJ) as reactants. When test fuels with higher derived cetane number (DCN) are used in the afterburner, it is observed that LBO occurs at lower afterburner global equivalence ratios (${\phi _{af}}$). This is due to the smaller chemical time scale of those test fuels, which enables the flame to be sustained under higher flow speeds. This is consistent with the results of previous studies. Additionally, this study shows that flashback also occurs at lower equivalence ratio for test fuels with higher DCN. This is a new finding and can be explained in a similar way to LBO. As the operating conditions approach the LBO or exceed flashback limits, the reactivity of shear layer also decreases, creating favourable conditions for them to occur. Moreover, for test fuels with low DCN (C-1 and C-5), blowoff occurs instead of flashback as ${\phi _{af}}$ increases. This can be attributed to the stronger pressure perturbation resulting from combustion instability in these flames compared to others. It demonstrates a stronger correlation between the pressure perturbation and the heat release rate fluctuation for C-1 and C-5 than that of other test fuels at the same equivalence ratio. In conclusion, it was found that test fuels with higher DCN have advantages in terms of LBO and stability, however, they are more prone to flashback.

Airborne particles, such as dust and volcanic ash, pose a serious hazard to aircraft in flight due to their potential to cause erosion damage to engine components. It is crucial to anticipate and address the impact of erosion wear on engine performance and safety. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how volcanic ash particles behave when ingested through a high bypass turbofan engine (HBTFE) and assess the development of erosion wear in the front components. The effects of four different ash samples are assessed in various scenarios of encountering volcanic ash during cruise flight conditions. First, the flow solution is obtained for all front components, including the Pitot intake, spinner, fan, inlet guide vanes (IGVs), outlet guide vanes (OGVs), and connecting ducts. Based on the flow data, the particle motion equations are solved step by step using an in-house trajectory and erosion code. This latter adopts the Lagrangian approach, which incorporates a particle-eddy interaction model and includes probabilistic descriptions for the release positions of particles, sizes, and restitution factors. The finite element method (FEM) is used to track particles through the computational cells and determine impact positions and conditions. As a result, the Pitot intake design seems to prevent many ash particles from reaching the fan blade beyond 80% of the span. The fan blade leading edge (LE) exhibits extreme erosion on both sides. The blade’s pressure side (PS) displays erosion spreading practically on the entirety of the surface, especially near the trailing edge (TE). In contrast, the suction side (SS) has scattered erosion at lower rates. Furthermore, the rotor’s hub presents almost uniform erosion patterns, whereas the shroud depicts scattered erosion. This large fan appears to function as a separator, expelling a significant amount of ash particles through the secondary duct, thereby reducing the engine core’s susceptibility to erosion. Out of the four volcanic ash samples, those from the Kelud and Etna volcanoes appear to cause the highest hourly eroded mass, about twice as much as the samples from the Chaiten and Eyjafjallajokull volcanoes.

The aviation industry’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions have driven the rapid development and scale-up of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). SAFs have the potential to significantly reduce CO2 lifecycle emissions by up to 80% in comparison to Jet A and other conventional fossil-derived jet fuels. For multiple logistical and practical reasons, it is preferable to ensure that SAFs are ‘essentially identical’ (also referred to as ‘drop-in SAF’) to conventional jet fuel in terms of their performance, durability and compatibility with existing hardware systems. Because the majority of SAFs are not identical (non-drop-in) to conventional jet fuel, they have not been approved for use in their neat (100%) form. Instead, these non-identical SAFs are named synthetic blend components (SBC) as they are blended with conventional fuels to different extents per ASTM D7566-23a. It should be noted that there are on-going efforts to develop non-drop in SAF specifications to broaden their proliferation and maximise the aviation industries’ ability to reduce CO2 lifecycle emissions. One very important area of focus is the compatibility of SAFs with engine and fuel system seals, specifically understanding the dynamics of elastomeric seals. To address this, a novel approach has been developed to measure seal dynamics in flowing fuel. This technique has been applied to study the dynamic seal behaviour of four industrially relevant elastomer seals commonly employed in aviation fuel systems. The study involved three test fuels: (i) conventional fossil-derived Jet A, neat hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) SAF, and neat alcohol to jet (ATJ) SAF. Notably, both HEFA and ATJ fuels contain 0% aromatics, in contrast to Jet A, which typically contains around 17% aromatics by volume. The novel fuel-elastomer test rig used in this study was designed to simulate a practical scenario in which fuel flows through the inner surface of a pre-loaded static O-ring. The results of these tests demonstrate that the behaviour of different nitrile elastomers is unique to their formulation, and in all cases, the behaviour in HEFA and ATJ SAF differs significantly from that in Jet A. However, new fuel approval tests may only list one type of elastomer for evaluation, for example the ‘Fit-for-Purpose’ test in ASTM D4054-22 Tier 2 lists one specific nitrile. The findings of this study highlight the complexities of fuel-elastomer interactions within nominally identical chemical families and emphasise the potential risks of assessing compatibility based on tests conducted with a single member of a chemical family.

Hydrogen is a promising energy carrier to decarbonise aviation. However, many challenges regarding its storage or handling still have to be solved to successfully utilise hydrogen in aircraft and at airport infrastructures. The increasing use of hydrogen also generates opportunities for disruptive improvements, like the possibility to integrate metal hydrides (MHs) into the hydrogen powertrain and its infrastructure. Besides their ability to store hydrogen, MHs enable a wide range of potential secondary functions such as high-power thermal applications or compression. This way, MHs may contribute to achieve the goal of sustainable hydrogen-powered aviation. Hence, potential MH application options and their current state-of-the-art are presented. Based on that overview, the following seven use cases for aviation are selected for evaluation: ‘hydrogen emergency storage’, ‘cabin air-conditioning’, ‘thermal management of fuel cells’, ‘gas gap heat switches’, ‘hydrogen boil-off recovery’, ‘onboard hydrogen compression’ and ‘hydrogen safety sensors’. Four of these use cases are investigated to achieve comparable degrees of detail to avoid misevaluations in the subsequent weighted point rating. The results reveal the high potential of MHs for ‘hydrogen boil-off recovery’, ‘hydrogen safety sensors’ and ‘cabin air-conditioning’. For the three most promising use cases, outlooks to their potential future implementation are provided in order to outline the ability of MHs to empower sustainable aviation. These investigations highlight the huge potential of MHs for boil-off treatment.

The current paper is focused on the conceptual design of a thermal management system with a liquid working medium for a commuter hybrid-electric aircraft, featuring a series propulsion configuration. Regarding the system’s architecture, parametric analyses are conducted, by altering the number of heat exchangers. To clarify, a centralised and a decentralised thermal management system architecture are examined. Furthermore, a computational model calculates the temperatures during the system’s operation and the required coolant mass flows to sufficiently cool all the compartments. Subsequently, the required heat exchanger surface is determined and the weight of each compartment that comprises the thermal management system can be calculated. It is worth noting, that the compartments’ cold plate weight is integrated. The results indicate that the decentralised configuration results in lower temperature fields for all components compared to the centralised configuration. However, the latter weighs 32.2% lower at 158.22kg while the decentralised configuration weighs 233.48kg.

Sensed data from high-value engineering systems is being increasingly exploited to optimise their operation and maintenance. In aerospace, returning all measured data to a central repository is prohibitively expensive, often causing useful, high-value data to be discarded. The ability to detect, prioritise and return useful data on asset and in real-time is vital to move toward more sustainable maintenance activities.

We present a data-driven solution for on-line detection and prioritisation of anomalous data that is centrally processed and used to update individualised digital twins (DT) distributed onto remote machines. The DT is embodied as a convolutional neural network (CNN) optimised for real-time execution on a resource constrained gas turbine monitoring computer. The CNN generates a state prediction with uncertainty, which is used as a metric to select informative data for transfer to a remote fleet monitoring system. The received data is screened for faults before updating the weights on the CNN, which are synchronised between real and virtual asset.

Results show the successful detection of a known in-flight engine fault and the collection of data related to high novelty pre-cursor events that were previously unrecognised. We demonstrate that data related to novel operation are also identified for transfer to the fleet monitoring system, allowing model improvement by retraining. In addition to these industrial dataset results, reproducible examples are provided for a public domain NASA dataset.

The data prioritisation solution is capable of running in real-time on production-standard low-power embedded hardware and is deployed on the Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 engines.

This contribution focuses on the abatement with hydrogen of CO2 and non-CO2 emissions. It is agenda-setting in two respects. Firstly, it challenges the globally accepted hydrocarbon sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway to sustainability and recommends that our industry accelerates along the hydrogen pathway to ‘green’ aviation. Secondly, it reports a philosophical and analytical investigation of appropriate accuracy on abatement strategies for nitrogen oxides and contrails of large hydrogen airliners. For the second contribution, a comparison is made of nitrogen oxide emissions and contrail avoidance options of two hydrogen airliners and a conventional airliner of similar passenger capacity. The hydrogen aircraft are representative of the first and second innovation waves where the main difference is the weight of the hydrogen tanks. Flights of 1000, 2000, 4000 and 8000 nautical miles are explored. Cranfield’s state of the art simulators for propulsion system integration and gas turbine performance (Orion and Turbomatch) were used for this. There are two primary contributions to knowledge. The first is a new set of questions to be asked of SAF and hydrogen decarbonising features. The second is the quantification of the benefits from hydrogen on non-CO2 emissions. For the second generation of long-range hydrogen-fuelled aircraft having gas turbine propulsion, lighter tanks (needing less thrust and lower gas temperatures) are anticipated to reduce NOx emissions by over 20%; in the case of contrails, the preliminary findings indicate that regardless of the fuel, contrails could largely be avoided with fuel-burn penalties of a few per cent. Mitigating action is only needed for a small fraction of flights. For conventional aircraft this penalty results in more CO2, while for hydrogen aircraft the additional emission is water vapour. The conclusion is that our research community should continue to consider hydrogen as the key ‘greening’ option for aviation, notwithstanding the very significant costs of transition.

Gas turbines play a vital role in various industries. Timely and accurately predicting their degradation is essential for efficient operation and optimal maintenance planning. Diagnostic and prognostic outcomes aid in determining the optimal compressor washing intervals. Diagnostics detects compressor fouling and estimates the trend up to the current time. If the forecast indicates fast progress in the fouling trend, scheduling offline washing during the next inspection event or earlier may be crucial to address the fouling deposit comprehensively. This approach ensures that compressor cleaning is performed based on its actual health status, leading to improved operation and maintenance costs. This paper presents a novel prognostic method for gas turbine degradation forecasting through a time-series analysis. The proposed approach uses the Temporal Fusion Transformer model capable of capturing time-series relationships at different scales. It combines encoder and decoder layers to capture temporal dependencies and temporal-attention layers to capture long-range dependencies across the encoded degradation trends. Temporal attention is a self-attention mechanism that enables the model to consider the importance of each time step degradation in the context of the entire degradation profile of the given health parameter. Performance data from multiple two-spool turbofan engines is employed to train and test the method. The test results show promising forecasting ability of the proposed method multiple flight cycles into the future. By leveraging the insights provided by the method, maintenance events and activities can be scheduled in a proactive manner. Future work is to extend the method to estimate remaining useful life.