Blade Tip Carving Effects on the Aerothermal Performance of a Transonic Turbine

2014 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. De Maesschalck ◽  
S. Lavagnoli ◽  
G. Paniagua

Tip leakage flows in unshrouded high speed turbines cause large aerodynamic penalties, induce significant thermal loads and give rise to intense thermal stresses onto the blade tip and casing endwalls. In the pursuit of superior engine reliability and efficiency, the turbine blade tip design is of paramount importance and still poses an exceptional challenge to turbine designers. The ever-increasing rotational speeds and pressure loadings tend to accelerate the tip flow velocities beyond the transonic regime. Overtip supersonic flows are characterized by complex flow patterns, which determine the heat transfer signature. Hence, the physics of the overtip flow structures and the influence of the geometrical parameters require further understanding to develop innovative tip designs. Conventional blade tip shapes are not adequate for such high speed flows and hence, potential for enhanced performances lays in appropriate tip shaping. The present research aims to quantify the prospective gain offered by a fully contoured blade tip shape against conventional geometries such as a flat and squealer tip. A detailed numerical study was conducted on a modern rotor blade (Reynolds number of 5.5 × 105 and a relative exit Mach number of 0.9) by means of three-dimensional (3D) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) calculations. Two novel contoured tip geometries were designed based on a two-dimensional (2D) tip shape optimization in which only the upper 2% of the blade span was modified. This study yields a deeper insight into the application of blade tip carving in high speed turbines and provides guidelines for future tip designs with enhanced aerothermal performances.

Author(s):  
C. De Maesschalck ◽  
S. Lavagnoli ◽  
G. Paniagua

Tip leakage flows in unshrouded high speed turbines cause large aerodynamic penalties, induce significant thermal loads and give rise to intense thermal stresses onto the blade tip and casing endwalls. In the pursuit of superior engine reliability and efficiency, the turbine blade tip design is of paramount importance and still poses an exceptional challenge to turbine designers. The ever-increasing rotational speeds and pressure loadings tend to accelerate the tip flow velocities beyond the transonic regime. Overtip supersonic flows are characterized by complex flow patterns, which determine the heat transfer signature. Hence, the physics of the overtip flow structures and the influence of the geometrical parameters on the overtip flow require further understanding to develop innovative tip designs. Conventional blade tip shapes are not adequate for such high speed flows and hence, potential for enhanced performances lays in appropriate tip shaping. The present research aims to quantify the prospective gain offered by a fully contoured blade tip shape against conventional geometries such as a flat and squealer tip. A detailed numerical study was conducted on a modern transonic turbine rotor blade (Reynolds number is 5.5 × 105, relative exit Mach number is 0.9) by means of three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes calculations. The novel contoured tip geometry was designed based on a 2D tip shape optimization in which only the upper 2% of the blade span was modified. This study yields a deeper insight into the application of blade tip carving in high speed turbines and provides guidelines for future tip designs with enhanced aerothermal performances.


2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Singh ◽  
P. K. Panigrahi ◽  
G. Biswas

Abstract A numerical study of rib augmented cooling of turbine blades is reported in this paper. The time-dependent velocity field around a pair of symmetrically placed ribs on the walls of a three-dimensional rectangular channel was studied by use of a modified version of Marker-And-Cell algorithm to solve the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes and energy equations. The flow structures are presented with the help of instantaneous velocity vector and vorticity fields, FFT and time averaged and rms values of components of velocity. The spanwise averaged Nusselt number is found to increase at the locations of reattachment. The numerical results are compared with available numerical and experimental results. The presence of ribs leads to complex flow fields with regions of flow separation before and after the ribs. Each interruption in the flow field due to the surface mounted rib enables the velocity distribution to be more homogeneous and a new boundary layer starts developing downstream of the rib. The heat transfer is primarily enhanced due to the decrease in the thermal resistance owing to the thinner boundary layers on the interrupted surfaces. Another reason for heat transfer enhancement can be attributed to the mixing induced by large-scale structures present downstream of the separation point.


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 841
Author(s):  
Yuzhen Jin ◽  
Huang Zhou ◽  
Linhang Zhu ◽  
Zeqing Li

A three-dimensional numerical study of a single droplet splashing vertically on a liquid film is presented. The numerical method is based on the finite volume method (FVM) of Navier–Stokes equations coupled with the volume of fluid (VOF) method, and the adaptive local mesh refinement technology is adopted. It enables the liquid–gas interface to be tracked more accurately, and to be less computationally expensive. The relationship between the diameter of the free rim, the height of the crown with different numbers of collision Weber, and the thickness of the liquid film is explored. The results indicate that the crown height increases as the Weber number increases, and the diameter of the crown rim is inversely proportional to the collision Weber number. It can also be concluded that the dimensionless height of the crown decreases with the increase in the thickness of the dimensionless liquid film, which has little effect on the diameter of the crown rim during its growth.


Author(s):  
Zainab J Saleh ◽  
Eldad J Avital ◽  
Theodosios Korakianitis

Increasing the gas temperature at the inlet to the high pressure turbine of gas turbine engines is known as a proven method to increase the efficiency of these engines. However, this will expose the blades’ surface to very high heat load and thermal damages. In the case of the un-shrouded turbine blades, the blade tip will be exposed to a significant thermal load due to the developed leakage flows in the tip gap, this leads to in-service burnout which degrades the blade tip and shortens its operational life. This paper studies the in-service burnout effect of the transonic tip flows over a cavity tip which is a configuration commonly used to reduce the tip leakage flows. This investigation is carried out experimentally within a transonic wind tunnel and computationally using steady and unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes approaches. Various flow measurements are established and different flow behaviour including separation bubbles, shockwave development and distinct flow interactions are captured and discussed. It is found that when the tip is exposed to the in-service burnout, leakage flow behaves in a significantly different way. In addition, the effective tip gap becomes much larger and allows higher leakage mass flow rate in comparison to the sharp-edge tip (i.e. a tip at the beginning of its operational life). The tip leakage losses are found much higher for the round-edge cavity tip (i.e. a tip exposed to burn-out effect). Experimental and computational flow visualisations, surface pressure measurements and discharge coefficient variation are given and analysed for several pressure ratios across the tip gap.


Author(s):  
Siavash Khajehhasani ◽  
Bassam Jubran

A numerical study on the effects of sister holes locations on film cooling performance is presented. This includes the change of the location of the individual discrete sister holes in the streamwise and spanwise directions, where each one of these directions includes 9 different locations, The simulations are performed using three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes analysis with the realizable k–ε model combined with the standard wall function. The variation of the sister holes in the streamwise direction provides similar film cooling performance as the base case for both blowing ratios of 0.5 and 1. On the other hand, the spanwise variation of the sister holes’ location has a more prominent effect on the effectiveness. In some cases, as a result of the anti-vortices generated from the sister holes and the repositioning of the sister holes in the spanwise direction, the jet lift-off effect notably decreases and more volume of coolant is distributed in the spanwise direction.


Author(s):  
Jean Franc¸ois Sigrist ◽  
Christian Laine ◽  
Dominique Lemoine ◽  
Bernard Peseux

This paper is related to the study of a nuclear propulsion reactor prototype for the French Navy. This prototype is built on ground and is to be dimensioned toward seismic loading. The dynamic analysis takes the coupled fluid structure analysis into account. The basic fluid models used by design engineers are inviscid incompressible or compressible. The fluid can be described in a bidimensional by slice or a three-dimensional approach. A numerical study is carried out on a generic problem for the linear FSI dynamic problem. The results of this study are presented and discussed. As a conclusion, the three-dimensional inviscid incompressible fluid appears to be the best compromise between the description of physical phenomena and the cost of modeling. The geometry of the reactor is such that large displacements of the structure in the fluid can occur. Therefore, the linearity hypothesis might not be longer valid. The case of large amplitude imposed oscillating motion of a cylinder in a confined fluid is numerically studied. A CFD code is used to investigate the fluid behavior solving the NAVIER-STOKES equations. The forces induced on the cylinder by the fluid are computed and compared to the linear solution. The limit of the linear model can then be exhibited.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiajun Chen ◽  
Yue Sun ◽  
Hang Zhang ◽  
Dakui Feng ◽  
Zhiguo Zhang

Mixing in pipe junctions can play an important role in exciting force and distribution of flow in pipe network. This paper investigated the cross pipe junction and proposed an improved plan, Y-shaped pipe junction. The numerical study of a three-dimensional pipe junction was performed for calculation and improved understanding of flow feature in pipe. The filtered Navier–Stokes equations were used to perform the large-eddy simulation of the unsteady incompressible flow in pipe. From the analysis of these results, it clearly appears that the vortex strength and velocity non-uniformity of centerline, can be reduced by Y-shaped junction. The Y-shaped junction not only has better flow characteristic, but also reduces head loss and exciting force. The results of the three-dimensional improvement analysis of junction can be used in the design of pipe network for industry.


Author(s):  
Yang Chen ◽  
Jun Li ◽  
Chaoyang Tian ◽  
Gangyun Zhong ◽  
Xiaoping Fan ◽  
...  

The aerodynamic performance of three-stage turbine with different types of leakage flows was experimentally and numerically studied in this paper. The leakage flows of three-stage turbine included the shroud seal leakage flow between the rotor blade tip and case, the diaphragm seal leakage flow between the stator blade diaphragm and shaft, as well as the shaft packing leakage flow and the gap leakage flow between the rotor blade curved fir-tree root and wheel disk. The total aerodynamic performance of three-stage turbine including leakage flows was firstly experimentally measured. The detailed flow field and aerodynamic performance were also numerically investigated using three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and S-A turbulence model. The numerical mass flow rate and efficiency showed well agreement with experimental data. The effects of leakage flows between the fir-tree root and the wheel disk were studied. All leakage mass flow fractions, including the mass flow rate in each hole for all sets of root gaps were given for comparison. The effect of leakage flow on the aerodynamic performance of three-stage was illustrated and discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (31) ◽  
pp. 1850344 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Eti ◽  
Z. Çetin ◽  
H. S. Sözüer

A detailed numerical study of low-loss silicon on insulator (SOI) waveguide bend is presented using the fully three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The geometrical parameters are optimized to minimize the bending loss over a range of frequencies. Transmission results for the conventional single bend and photonic crystal assisted SOI waveguide bend are compared. Calculations are performed for the transmission values of TE-like modes where the electric field is strongly transverse to the direction of propagation. The best obtained transmission is over 95% for TE-like modes.


Author(s):  
N. Lymberopoulos ◽  
K. Giannakoglou ◽  
I. Nikolaou ◽  
K. D. Papailiou ◽  
A. Tourlidakis ◽  
...  

Mechanical constraints dictate the existence of tip clearances in rotating cascades, resulting to a flow leakage through this clearance which considerably influences the efficiency and range of operation of the machine. Three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solvers are often used for the numerical study of compressor and turbine stages with tip-clearance. The quality of numerical predictions depends strongly on how accurately the blade tip region is modelled; in this respect the accurate modelling of tip region was one of the main goals of this work. In the present paper, a 3-D Navier-Stokes solver is suitably adapted so that the flat tip surface of a blade and its sharp edges could be accurately modelled, in order to improve the precision of the calculation in the tip region. The adapted code solves the fully elliptic, steady, Navier-Stokes equations through a space-marching algorithm and a pressure correction technique; the H-type topology is retained, even in cases with thick leading edges where a special treatment is introduced herein. The analysis is applied to two different cases, a linear cascade and a compressor rotor, and comparisons with experimental data are provided.


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