New Insights From Conceptual Design of an Additive Manufactured 300 W Micro Gas Turbine Towards UAV Applications
Abstract Owing to high energy density of hydrocarbon fuels, ultra-micro gas turbines with power outputs below 1 kW have potential as battery replacement in drones. To overcome the obstacles observed in previous works on gas turbines of this scale, novel gas turbine architecture is proposed based on conventional roller bearing technology that operates at up to 500,000 RPM and additively manufactured monolithic rotor in cantilevered configuration, equipped with internal cooling blades. The optimum turbomachinery design is elaborated using diabatic cycle calculation, coupled with turbomachinery meanline design. This approach provides new insights on interdependencies of heat transfer, component efficiency and system electric efficiency. Thereby, reduced design pressure ratio of 2.5 with 1200 K turbine inlet temperature is identified as most suitable for 300 W electric power output. In following, material properties and design constraints for the monolithic rotor are obtained from available additive manufacturing technologies. Rotordynamic simulations are then conducted for four available materials using simplified rotor model. CFD simulations are conducted to quantify compressor efficiency and conjugate heat transfer analysis is performed to assess the benefit of internal cooling cavity and vanes for different rotor materials. It is demonstrated that the cavity flow absorbs large heat flux from turbine to compressor, thus cooling the rotor structure and improving the diabatic cycle efficiency. Finally, results of this conceptual study show that ultra-micro gas turbine with electric efficiency of up to 5% is feasible, while energy density is increased by factor of 3.6, compared to lithium-ion batteries.