Development of a Steam Turbine Using the Quasi-3D Inverse Design Method

The growing demand for sustainable and efficient energy conversion has highlighted the limitations of conventional forward design approaches in steam turbine development. These geometry-driven methods often rely on iterative optimization and fail to capture complex 3D flow phenomena such as secondary flows, vortex formation, and entropy gradients. This study applies the Inverse Design Method (IDM) to the design of a single-stage axial flow steam turbine, providing a flow-driven alternative that directly prescribes aerodynamic performance. on a 2D A quasi-3D IDM framework was derived from the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, incorporating entropy effects through the streamfunction-vorticity formulation. The governing equations were solved numerically meridional grid in MATLAB. Thermodynamic closure employed real steam properties from the IAPWS-IF97 property table. The resulting blade angles, wrap-angle distributions, and hybrid Zangeneh loading (fore-loaded hub, aft-loaded shroud) were implemented in the CFturbo IDM solver to generate the three-dimensional blade geometries for the inlet stator, rotor, and outlet stator, which were subsequently validated through CFD simulations in ANSYS CFX using real steam properties. CFD results showed close quantitative agreement with MATLAB and CFturbo predictions: blade angle and pressure ratio deviations were <5% and stage efficiency was consistent with literature values (isentropic efficiency ~0.707). Minimal secondary flow phenomena were observed, with mesh-independence results (<5% change key metrics) and limited turbulence model sensitivity (SST k-ω baseline). Finally, a scaled prototype turbine was fabricated by fused deposition modeling (FDM) to demonstrate practical feasibility. The study establishes IDM as a rigorous and practical methodology for steam turbine blade design, bridging theoretical derivation with industrial application.