Task

Within modern gas turbines, contactless sealing mechanisms are necessary to seal the airflow between high-speed rotating and stationary surfaces. These seals operate with a minimum possible gap width between the rotor and the stator, so that the leakage is reduced and the maximum turbine inlet temperatures and pressure ratios can be increased. In the adaptive seals test rig at ITS, prototype adaptive seals are tested against a rotor and activated with controlled inlet and outlet pressurized air flow.

In this work, a dynamic model of a movable adaptive seal will be further developed using MATLAB Simscape. This will simulate the radial movement of the adaptive seal “shoes” which move based on pressure changes. Current inputs to the model are the pressures measured from the test rig, and estimated seal characteristics (friction, spring coefficient, etc.). Running the model outputs the shoe movement over a test run, which is then compared with the real movement measured in the test rig.

The key goal of this work will be converting the model to enable giving the shoe movement as input, along with the pressures, therefore facilitating the deduction of the seal characteristics as an output of the simulation. This will require detailed theoretical description of the shoe movement. Prior experience with MATLAB is preferred.