Virtual Prototyping and Additive Manufacturing of a Vaned Diffuser for a Research Jet Engine

Advanced methods can significantly reduce costs and time-to-market of new designs. This can be utilized in aviation industry including gas turbine units. The present paper focuses on two important aspects: virtual prototyping using computational fluid dynamics and additive manufacturing. These approaches have been utilized on the micro turbojet engine in the Laboratory of Department of Aeronautics, Naval Architecture and Railway Vehicles (DANAR) of Budapest University of Technology and Economics in order to investigate the stator vanes of the compressor stage. The paper describes the optimization process including numerical aspects and the experiments with an additive manufactured vane assembly.