Laboratory infrared thermal assessment of laser-sintered high-pressure nozzle guide vanes to derisk engine design programs

The continuing maturation of metal laser-sintering technology (direct metal laser sintering (DMLS)) presents the opportunity to derisk the engine design process by experimentally down selecting high-pressure nozzle guide vane (HPNGV) cooling designs using laboratory tests of laser sintered instead of cast parts to assess thermal performance.Such tests could be seen as supplementary to thermal-paint test engines, which are used during certification to validate cooling system designs. In this paper, we compare conventionally cast and laser-sintered titanium alloy parts in back-to-back experimental tests at engine representative conditions over a range of coolant mass flow rates. Tests were performed in the University of Oxford Annular Sector Heat Transfer Facility. The thermal performance of the cast and laser-sintered parts measured using new infrared processing techniques is shown to be very similar, demonstrating the utility of laser-sintered parts for preliminary engine thermal assessments. We conclude that the methods reported in this paper are sufficiently mature to make assessments which could influence engine development programs