Optimum material evaluation for gas turbine blade using Reverse Engineering (RE) and FEA

Gas turbines play a major role in the field of aviation owing to their high power to weight ratio and being self-contained, ascompared to other conventional power generating units. The main function of the blades in gas turbines is imparting energy to, or extracting it, from a fluid stream. Since the underlying function of the blades is to smoothly change the velocity of fluid flow,they are generally comprised of parametric sculptured surface models. In absence of design data, the reverse engineering process can be considered as a major tool for modeling. Reverse engineering process involves sensing the geometry of existing part, creating a geometric model of the part from the sensed data and passing this model to an appropriate CAD/CAM system for manufacturing. This paper mainly deals with the modeling and analysis of gas turbine blades. The design data for a turbine bladeis obtained using Reverse Engineering technique. Using the data so obtained, a model of the turbine blade is created in ANSYSFEA package. For the given loading conditions, the blade is analyzed for static structural analysis for different materials at varying centrifugal loads and different materials and a safe and feasible material is suggested.