Amplification of Operational Uncertainty Induced by Nonideal Flows in Supersonic Turbine Cascades

In high-temperature transcritical organic Rankine cycles (ORCs), the expansion process may take place in the neighborhood of the thermodynamic critical point. In this region, many organic fluids feature a value of the fundamental derivative of gas dynamics Γ that is less than unity. As a consequence, severe nonideal gas-dynamic effects can be possibly observed. Examples of these nonideal effects are the nonmonotonic variation of the Mach number along an isentropic expansion, oblique shocks featuring an increase of the Mach number, and a significant dependence of the flow field on the upstream total state. To tackle this latter nonideal effect, an uncertainty-quantification strategy combined with Reynolds-averaged flow simulations is devised to evaluate the turbine performance in presence of operational uncertainty. The results clearly indicate that a highly nonideal expansion process leads to an amplification of the operational uncertainty. Specifically, given an uncertainty in the order of 1% in cycle nominal conditions, the mass flow rate and cascade losses vary ±4% and ±0.75 percentage points, respectively. These variations are four and six times larger than those prompted by an ideal-like expansion process. The flow delivered to the first rotating cascade is severely altered as well, leading to local variations in the rotor incidence angle up to 10 deg. A decomposition of variance contributions reveals that the uncertainty in the upstream total temperature is mainly responsible for these variations. Finally, the understanding of the physical mechanism behind these changes allows us to generalize the present findings to other organic-fluid flows.