MIT Team Receives ASME International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)’s Gas Turbine Award

Jinwook Lee (PhD ’19), Zoltán S. Spakovszky, Edward M. Greitzer, and Mark Drela, of MIT’s department of aeronautics and astronautics (AeroAstro), and Jérôme Talbotec, of Safran Aircraft Engines, have been named recipients of the International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)’s Gas Turbine Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for their paper entitled “Effects of Surface Waviness on Fan Blade Boundary Layer Transition and Profile Loss – Part 1: Methodology and Computational Results.” Their work resulted in a new methodology to assess the effect of surface waviness on laminar-turbulent transition, thus profile loss, in civil turbofan carbon composite blades. The Gas Turbine Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the literature of combustion gas turbines or gas turbines thermally combined with nuclear or steam power plants.