Turbine Blade - Introduction

Introduction

In a gas turbine engine, a single turbine section is made up of a disk or hub that holds many turbine blades. That turbine section is connected to a compressor section via a shaft (or "spool"), and that compressor section can either be axial or centrifugal. Air is compressed, raising the pressure and temperature, through the compressor stages of the engine. The pressure and temperature are then greatly increased by combustion of fuel inside the combustor, which sits between the compressor stages and the turbine stages. The high temperature and high pressure exhaust gases then pass through the turbine stages. The turbine stages extract energy from this flow, lowering the pressure and temperature of the air, and transfer the kinetic energy to the compressor stages along the spool. This is process is very similar to how an axial compressor works, only in reverse.

The number of turbine stages varies in different types of engines, with high bypass ratio engines tending to have the most turbine stages. The number of turbine stages can have a great effect on how the turbine blades are designed for each stage. Many gas turbine engines are twin spool designs, meaning that there is a high pressure spool and a low pressure spool. Other gas turbines used three spools, adding an intermediate pressure spool between the high and low pressure spool. The high pressure turbine is exposed to the hottest, highest pressure, air, and the low pressure turbine is subjected to cooler, lower pressure air. That difference in conditions leads the design of high pressure and low pressure turbine blades to be significantly different in material and cooling choices even though the aerodynamic and thermodynamic principles are the same.