Future gas turbine package design freeform wood fibre composite manufacturing

Abstract

Wood is a sustainable material widely used as a raw material and can be used as a component for composite materials. With the rise of additive manufacturing processes and especially 3D printing, wood-based composite can be used to create complex-shaped pieces that cannot be designed out of standard wood materials. In this context, this project redesigned a Siemens gas turbine (GT) package piece into a 3D printable design and developed a wood-based 3D printable composite material from Polyethylene and wood suitable for the printing of this GT package piece into a wood-based 3D printed part. The GT combustion air inlet has been chosen for the redesign because of its complex geometry. Once all the loads that can be applied to the GT combustion air inlet have been identified, a basic 3D digital model is created. This model has been used to conduct simulations to evaluate the stress applied on the structure by the loads; the simulations give a maximum pressure of 20□. In the second section, an experimental campaign is conducted to create different wood-based composite filaments with different wood % in weight. The filament is then characterized with differential scanning calorimetry analysis, thermogravimetric analysis, melt flow index measurements, and scanning electron microscope pictures. The characterizations helped to evaluate the printability of the composite and the ideal printing temperature. Afterward, tensile and density samples are printed to evaluate the mechanical properties of the different composites. A tensile test on a density sample gives a stress/strain curve that can be read to obtain the Young modulus and the maximum tensile strength of the sample, while weighting the density sample leads to the density of the printed composite. The wood-based composites with 10% and 20% wood reached respectively a maximum tensile strength of 11□ and 7□. A sustainability assessment has been conducted at the end of the study to evaluate the impact on the environment of a wood-based composite 3D printed GT combustion air inlet and compare the results with the impact of an aluminum-based GT combustion air inlet currently used by Siemens in their GT package. The sustainability showed, in particular, that the 20% wood-based composite has 44% less impact than aluminum per Kg regarding CO2 emissions.

Date	23 Feb 2024
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Lucas Hof (Supervisor) & Nicole R. Demarquette (Co-supervisor)