Measurements of Pressure and Temperature in a Short Duration Turbine Facility

Experimental validation of turbine performance can be a challenging task. The high temperatures, scale of the hardware, and gas composition rend taking these measurements in a real turbine virtuously impossible. Facilities such as the Air Force’s Turbine Research Facility enable acquiring this data through the use of simulating the turbine environment. The Turbine Research Facility is a blow down facility for testing full scale turbine hardware that allows control of the gas temperature and composition as well as matches the Reynolds number, pressure ratio, corrected speed, and temperature ratios in a more benign environment. The facility has been instrumented with thermocouples, heat flux gauges, and pressure taps for collecting experimental data. These are typically high frequency response measurements but at particular static locations making for low spatial resolution. These measurement have recently been supplemented with Temperature and Pressure-Sensitive Paints which provide high spatial resolution measurements at low frequency. This report details a test program that acquired temperature, pressure, and heat flux measurements using traditional gauges and temperature and pressure using Temperature and Pressure-sensitive paints at a range of flow conditions. Comparisons between the measurements indicated that the paints provided similar mean results. This suggests that Temperature and Pressure-Sensitive paints can be implemented into the Turbine Research Facility and provide high spatial resolution data with reasonable accuracy at moderate temperatures