Dr Masha Folk, Professor Robert Miller and Dr John Coull have been awarded the Gas Turbine Award, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) highest annual honour in the field.
The Gas Turbine Award was established in 1963 to be 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.
Dr Folk (Engineering 2014) is only the third woman to have won the award since it was founded in 1963. Two of these three women were from the University of Cambridge’s Whittle Laboratory.
Professor Miller has won the award for the fourth time, also having won it in 2010, 2014 and 2015. Only one other person has ever won the award more times.
The award was given for the paper The Impact of Combustor Turbulence on Turbine Loss Mechanisms. The paper shows that the extremely high levels of turbulence created in the combustion chamber of a jet engine increases the loss in a turbine blade row located downstream of it by 47%. This contrasts to industry design methods which predict no increase in loss. The paper explains the physical mechanism responsible for this change, allowing it to be modelled, and exploited, in the design of jet engines.
The Gas Turbine Award was established in 1963 and is given once a year in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the literature of combustion gas turbines or gas turbines thermally combined with nuclear or steam power plants published in the previous year.
You can hear Professor Miller and Dr Folk, who now works at Rolls-Royce, talking about how to achieve zero-carbon flight and land-based power on the video recording of the Global Cambridge lecture 2020.
The paper is also available in full via Academia.edu.
Dr. Masha Folk, Robert J. Miller and Dr. John Coull, - the 2021 ASME Gas Turbine Award winners will be presenting at the ASME Turbomachinery Technical Virtual Conference and Exhibition: June 7 – 11, 2021 event.
