For this project, our main tools were Autodesk Inventor, GRANTA, and manual calculations.

GRANTA is an online materials database that allowed our team to create Materials Performance Indexes (MPIs) to determine which material was optimal for maximizing and minimizing variables. For example, this chart showed us which materials maximized yield strength and minimized cost:

Chart.png

After using GRANTA to select our material as low-alloy steel, we used Autodesk Inventor to make a 3D model of our turbine blade.

blade.png

From here, we needed to determine which thickness was optimum to get a maximum blade deflection of less than 10 mm. We used hand calculations such as the following to get a baseline...

Calc.png

...then, we used Inventor's built-in software to simulate the deflection for a variety of thicknesses around 20-30 mm.

Deflection.png

Here, we found 25 mm gave an optimal deflection of 9.661 mm.