Milestone 4 required that our team determine the geometry requirements of the turbine blade, specifically the required sheet thickness. The sheet thickness must satisfy the stiffness design constraint: the blade’s maximum deflection must be less than 10 mm.

Each team member had to estimate the deflection of a turbine blade using one of the 4 airfoil thicknesses outlined in Table 1 (i.e., each team member should calculate deflection with on of the following values of t).

When using the above data each student calculated a deflection based on the different thicknesses.

An example of my deflection calculation.

After each team member has calculated a deflection, each deflection calculation was used in an Autodesk deflection simulation. Using Inventor’s built-in deflection simulation, we ran a simulation, continually iterating by either increasing or decreasing the thickness of the blade until the design constraint is satisfied.

Our deflection simulation.