Dr Liping Xu

BSc (Beijing), PhD

My research, carried out in the Whittle Laboratory of Engineering Department, concerns the fluid flows in turbomachines, in particular those in gas turbine engines for airplane propulsion and power generation, and in steam turbines for power generation. Although such machinery has been invented for many decades, there is still no reliable predictive tool for the flow and many aspects of the flow crucial to machine performance are still not well understood. It is essential to advance our fundamental understandings of the flow behaviours in order to provide the industry with the tools to develop better, more environmentally friendly and more reliable machines. One of my main research foci is the transonic unsteady flow in the fan of modern civil aeroengines, to understand how the shockwaves developed inside the fan blade passage due to supersonic flow speeds affect the fan's aerodynamic performance and its noise characteristics. The tools I use for my research are mainly Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and I rely upon our industry partners for experimental validation and complementation. For this reason I work closely with companies like Rolls Royce, Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industry. I am also part of the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team. The recent launched Initiative is to develop the technologies required for developing a passenger airplane which would not be heard flying outside of the airport perimeters and we are responsible for the related propulsion system technologies. This is an extremely challenging and highly interdisciplinary project because for the first time noise criterion stands out as the prime design target for an airplane and requires not only high integration of internal aerodynamics (engine) and external aerodynamics (airframe) in technology, but also that of the technology and airplane operation.