ABSTRACT
The use of turbomachinery in gas turbine power plants, be it to produce power for ground-based utilities or as aircraft engines, is one of the most significant as well as fascinating technological advances in our lifetime; the last 50 years. Justifiably so, it has attracted the attention of an endless list of prominent research engineers and scientists and, subsequently, it may be regarded as a very mature field. We have now entered an age of turbomachinery applications which pushes the bounds of material science, fluid dynamics, combustion science, and so forth and truly demands creativity and ingenuity on the part of the scientist to achieve even remotely identifiable improvements in turbine performance or compressor efficiency. An improvement in compressor efficiency may be attainable, even when a significant increase might be unthinkable. Such improvements can result in a drastic reduction in engine weight, a property which is quite important in aircraft design. It has become fashionable to research methods in passive and active control of disturbances upstream of compressor inlets to promote operation at lower engine mass flow rates, therefore, dramatically increasing the stall margin of the engine. Hence, they have been given the term "smart engines" by their developers. • Thin-film cooling is a subject of considerable
interest which has risen as a means of increasing the upper bounds of combustor exit temperatures, the main constraint for turbine performance. Invariably, turbomachinery technology has pushed on into the new age, incorporating marginal advances in fluid dynamics, heat transfer, structural dynamics, and materials research.
