Ideas and Methods of Turbomachinery Aerodynamics: A Historical View

Most accounts of the history of turbomachinery look at the machines that were produced. This paper looks at the underlying ideas behind the designs and the methods that were used. It will be seen that in this history the inventiveness of engine designers far outstripped the capabilities of these methods and, further, that this gap spurred the advancement of new ideas. Thus, although analyses were unable to capture many features of the flows, this has not precluded aeroengine turbomachinery from being successfully developed using methods that were far from a complete description. The paper concludes with a look at two different ways in which engineers have dealt with some turbomachinery aerodynamic issues that seemed to offer major difficulties at the time.