A New Test Rig Facility To Study Aeronautic Low Pressure Turbine Thermal Behavior

The next generation of aircraft gas turbines has to match the requirements of an increasing efficiency combined with very low pollutants emissions. To achieve these goals a new test Rig facility has been built at the Energy Department of Politecnico di Torino to study the thermal and fluid phenomena taking place in an aircraft Low Pressure Turbine (LPT). The overall aims of the Rig are: to allow improving the knowledge about the inner turbine components thermal behavior and to use the acquired know-how to develop innovative technical solutions that can be directly tested on the same Rig. The Rig replicates, properly scaled, the operative conditions of one stage of a modern LPT for long range aircrafts, and its Test Article (TA) has been sized considering thermal similitude of main involved phenomena. The TA, working at high temperature under different pressure conditions, is able to reproduce the main LPT mass flow rates from the Flow Path to the Cooling and the external Active Clearance Control system. In this work the design of the test facility, the measuring techniques and some preliminary experimental results are shown and discussed.