An Innovative and Ambitious Student Design Project: To Build a Small-Scale Brayton Cycle Engine on a Short Timeline With a Limited Budget

The Brayton Cycle is one of the primary gas power cycles taught as part of any thermodynamics course. While students learn its operation in various configurations on paper, they are not always afforded the opportunity to work with an actual gas turbine engine up close. This project allowed students to use knowledge learned in the classroom and apply it to a real design problem. Design projects early in an engineering program are less common since the focus is generally on the fundamental equations; however, solving complex engineering problems and applying these solutions to designs are among the required ABET program outcomes. Therefore, enhancing the students’ skills in these areas early and often is a motivation for early design projects. To accomplish this, students enrolled in Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, a junior-level course, were tasked with designing and building a small-scale Brayton Cycle on a limited budget in a very short timeframe. In addition to preparing students for senior design this project aimed to be truly multifaceted as it combined skills and knowledge learned in several previous courses such as: Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Instrumentation, Machine Design, and Circuits. Uniquely, this design assignment did not stop with the paper plans but required the students to build a testable prototype. This allowed them to learn firsthand how manufacturing limitations and supply chain delays can impact the final design. While it was desired that the turbine would generate enough power to ultimately drive the compressor it was understood that such a goal may be infeasible. Therefore, the focus was more on the design process as opposed to designing and fabricating a working gas turbine engine.