Abstract
Managing Uncertainty through an Engine Design Cycle
Names like Sir Henry Royce, James A. Allison, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison bring to mind innovation, work ethic, genius – but most importantly contribution to others. We now live in a much more connected time, where the speed of contribution brings exponential advances in technologies. This progress demands focus. Focus to cut through the barrage of data and new ideas and then add value for our customers and businesses. To contribute in aerospace engineering, there is an ever-increasing need to balance multiple objectives: increasing product safety, time on wing, and design speed and agility, while decreasing fuel usage, noise, emissions, and cost.
To leverage the advances and meet these multiple objectives requires a change in thinking, processes, and team work. Design cycles cannot be improved by simply compressing or eliminating essential engineering work. To improve, we must re-engineer the very design process itself. A key element is to address and manage variation and uncertainty throughout the design process. Robust Design, System Thinking, and Uncertainty Quantification help do this and drive essential improvement into the product. Often overlooked is the synergistic requirement to develop better processes and more cohesive teams to facilitate this approach.
Rolls-Royce is well into this Journey, but is also continuously improving. Robust Design is now driving designs to better simulation methods and better understanding of real-world variability. Even so, there are a number of challenges that both Rolls-Royce and the Industry face. This talk focuses on the application of these methods to a typical gas turbine subsystem design process and the simulation and validation challenges that must be addressed to continue to improve.
About the Speaker
Andrew White, Rolls-Royce Corporation
Robust Design Thermals SME Team Lead
Andrew White earned a B.S. in Physics and M.S. Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. He joined the Rolls-Royce Corporation cooperative student program in 2003 working in Advanced Compressor Design, Gear Manufacturing, Installations & Externals, and completing his Master's project on turbine airfoil parameter-inversion optimization. Upon joining the Turbine Aerothermal Design team full-time, he first developed a multi-physics optimization tool for turbine blade cooling, and later performed film cooling trajectory CFD studies on military turbine nozzle guide vanes. Andrew moved into the Thermals team in 2008, performing thermo-mechanical simulation/validation for both military and civil gas turbine engine turbines and compressors.
His interests include temperature and tip clearance prediction and validation methods, analysis automation, and the application of Uncertainty Quantification in thermo-mechanics. Since 2013, Andrew has led the Rolls-Royce Global Thermals SME group on Robust Design. He earned his DCOV Green Belt in 2015, completing a project that applied probabilistic thermal analysis to turbine disc lifing.
