Biography
Professor Graham Pullan is Co-Director of the Whittle Laboratory. He leads the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Propulsion and Power and is also the Cambridge Co-Director. He completed his
Research topics
Improvements to the aerodynamic performance of turbines and compressors are directly linked to reductions in the enviornmental impact of jet engines and power stations.
Accelerated computational analysis
The Turbostream flow solver has been written to run efficiently on the modern many-core processors found in graphics cards. These chips have hundreds of cores and Turbostream can utilise them to run an order magnitude faster than a traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. This has a major impact on design where either the number of candidate blades, or the fidelity with which they are analysed, can be greatly increased.
dbslice is an interactive web-based post-processing tool for the analysis of large numbers of computations (or experiments).
Compressor operability
Rotating stall limits the operation of compressors at low flow rates. In a collaborative project with colleagues at MIT's Gas Turbine Lab, computations and experiments were used to discover the origin and structure of the "spike-type" stall inception process.
At part-speed, flow is removed from the compressor to maintain stability. Research using a compressor rig (corroborated by CFD) has revealed the impact on compressor performance of removing air non-uniformly from the compressor circumference.
Novel turbine aerodynamic concepts
Conventional wisdom dictates that low aspect ratio (span-to-chord ratio) blades have a poor aerodynamic performance. A recent project using a novel "splitter blade" concept has shown that significant improvements can be made.
Publications & updates
Modelling Turbine Acoustic Impedance
Authors:
J. Brind, G. Pullan
Publication:
International Journal of Turbomachinery, Propulsion and Power
DOI:
10.3390/ijtpp6020018
Effect of Blade Row Interaction on Rotor Film Cooling
Authors:
J. Brind, G. Pullan
Publication:
Journal of Turbomachinery
DOI:
10.1115/1.4047617
Loss in Axial Compressor Bleed Systems
Authors:
S.D. Grimshaw, J. Brind, G. Pullan, R. Seki
Publication:
Proceedings of ASME Turbo Expo 2019