Education
For undergraduate and graduate students
Turbomachinery Research Consortium (TRC)
The Turbomachinery Research Consortium is an organization of major turbomachinery developers and users who have joined with the Turbomachinery Laboratory at Texas A&M University to find answers to important questions about turbomachinery performance and reliability.
Consider: rotordynamic instability in the space shuttle's main engine high-pressure turbopump delayed the shuttle development program by six months. And unreliability in the performance of multi-stage centrifugal compressors costs the natural gas industry millions of dollars a day in lost production. Better understanding of annular gas seals and squeeze-film dampers is crucial to the solution of both problems. And computational fluid dynamic developments that lead to development of improved impeller or seal designs are important to all turbomachinery users and manufacturers. This is why the Turbomachinery Research Consortium exists. The consortium was organized in 1981 to provide a framework for turbomachinery developers and users to combine to support research into important research questions that affect their businesses. Acting together, its members support research into problems of internal flow (fluid mechanics, heat transfer, gas dynamics) and structural reliability (materials, structures, vibrations) -- that affect turbomachinery performance and efficiency.
TRC members choose the direction of TRC-funded research by Turbomachinery Laboratory engineers. They get advance access to the results of that research and to valuable turbomachinery-testing software developed for TRC members. TRC support also enhances undergraduate and graduate education in turbomachinery-related engineering at Texas A&M.
