The Effusion Plate Tool is a program that enables fast and high quality design of an effusion plate and the associated cooling holes on a gas turbine combustor. It used to be a tedious manual process to create a design for the effusion plate and cooling holes. The designer has to meet certain cooling area and hole distribution density requirements that are not known until a design has been created. Therefore a trial-and-error type of approach had to be adopted. It took weeks to manually layout about 2000 holes, go through several iterations, and finally come up with a design that meets the specifications. Once the design requirements were changed the whole process had to be repeated. We decided to develop an Effusion Plate Design Tool with the following objectives
significantly speed up the design process,
capture the best practice and reduce process variation,
keep the designer in the loop to allow design flexibility, and
develop easy to use graphical user interface.
