Effect of actively managed thermal-loading in optimal design of an aeroengine turbine disk

The effect of actively managed thermal loading for optimal design of turbine disk was investigated to seek the better balance between strength demand and minimum weight/volume. An integrated process of design was developed to achieve automatic iteration for this multi-objective optimization problem. Under equal consumption of heating energy and cooling air conditions, two types of actively managed thermal loading with different allocation ratios of heating energy (ϕ = 0.1 and ϕ = 0.2) in the outer and inner surface of disk were considered in the process of optimization. As a comparison, the disk at conventional thermal loading conditions (ϕ = 0) was also optimized at the same design conditions. Results showed that the better structure of disk with smaller weight/volume and lower maximum stress level was obtained due to thermal loading management. Through actively managing the thermal loading to reorganize the temperature distribution of disk, the optimized weight/volume and maximum hub stress fallen 2.24% and 12.16% respectively to compare with the conventional thermal loading condition. The reason for the preceding effect could be explained that an artificial V-shaped temperature distribution was built in the disk through actively managing thermal loading, and correspondingly, the reverse temperature gradient between hub and web produced a pulling effect and counteracted parts of stress from rotating.