Meet GReTa - the Generic REsearch TurbofAn!

After a long and exhausting journey, I'm excited to introduce an open-source turbofan low-pressure compressor CFD model.

Why bother❔

👉 High-fidelity computational models are paramount where experiments are difficult and costly. This includes: ⛈️ Adverse weather events and atmospheric pollution, such as rain, ice, sand, dust, volcanic ash ingestion, ❄️ Accretions of particulate matter, compressor fouling and erosion, 💨 Intake distortion, 🔴 Operational limits, such as compressor stall and surge, 🔊 Engine acoustic performance, ⚙️ Development of jet engine component optimisation tools, 💡 Feasibility studies of novel cycles and engine architectures,  🕵️ Engine design verification and certification.

👉 Up until now, there was no publicly available generic engine model representative of modern turbofans. An open virtual test case: 🔁 Addresses a major challenge of reproducibility in turbomachinery research, which is data obfuscation, ↔️ Allows for a fair and consistent comparison of modelling capabilities from different stakeholders in an engine-representative environment, ⏩ May accelerate the development of numerical methods required for engine design verification and validation in complex scenarios, thus enabling a quicker path to much-anticipated certification by computational analysis, 💰 This will ultimately reduce the reliance on flight tests, which are tremendously expensive and too late in the design process!

I hope the model will benefit the community when working with proprietary data is impractical or impossible. I intend to keep working on it, so stay tuned for further updates! 📻

📜 Zawadzki N, Szymanski A, Igie U (2023), GReTa - An open-source generic research turbofan low-pressure compressor model, Proceedings of Global Power and Propulsion Society.