Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Interactions Between Axial Turbine and Non-Axisymmetric Exhaust Hood

Author(s):  
Jing-Lun Fu ◽  
Si-Jing Zhou ◽  
Jian-Jun Liu

This paper describes experimental and numerical studies on the coupled flow field in a single turbine stage and exhaust hood model. The turbine stage with 22 stator blades and 30 rotor blades is especially designed for the hood model, which is a typical design for Westinghouse model 300/600 MW steam turbine. Unsteady pressure at the rotor blade, hood outer casing, unsteady total pressure at the stage outlet and velocity distributions at the turbine outlet and hood exit, in addition to static pressure distributions at the diffuser tip and hub end-walls and at hood outer casing, are measured and compared with numerical predictions. The flow details in the exhaust system with the whole annulus stator and rotor blade rows are simulated by employing CFD software CFX-5. It is found that the swirl angle profile and total pressure profile caused by the upstream turbine at the diffuser inlet have an unfavorable effect on the exhaust hood performance. The non-axisymmetric back-pressure generated by the downstream exhaust hood leads to the local flow varying for each stator and rotor blades and low frequency fluctuation in the aerodynamic force on the blade.

2011 ◽  
Vol 134 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing-Lun Fu ◽  
Jian-Jun Liu ◽  
Si-Jing Zhou

The exhaust system in condensing steam turbines is used to recover leaving kinetic energy of the last stage turbine, while guiding the flow from turbine to condenser. The flows in the exhaust system and the turbine stage are fully coupled and inherently unsteady. The unsteady flow interactions between the turbine and the exhaust system have a strong impact on the blade loading or blade aerodynamic force. This paper describes the unsteady flow interactions between a single-stage axial turbine and an exhaust system. The experimental and numerical studies on the coupled flow field in the single-stage turbine and the exhaust hood model under different operational conditions have been carried out. Unsteady pressure at the turbine rotor blade, turbine outlet, and exhaust outcasing are measured and compared with the numerical prediction. The details of unsteady flow in the exhaust system with the whole annulus stator and rotor blade rows are simulated by employing the computational fluid dynamics software CFX-5. Results show that for the investigated turbine-exhaust configuration the influence of the flow field in the exhaust system on the unsteady blade force is much stronger than that of the stator and rotor interaction. The flow pattern in the exhaust system changes with the turbine operational condition, which influences the unsteady flow in the turbine stage further.


Author(s):  
Jie Gao ◽  
Feng Lin ◽  
Xiying Niu ◽  
Qun Zheng ◽  
Guoqiang Yue ◽  
...  

The marine gas turbine exhaust volute is an important component that connects a power turbine and an exhaust system, and it is of great importance to the overall performance of the gas turbine. Gases exhausted from the power turbine are expanded and deflected 90 degrees in the exhaust volute, and then discharge radially into the exhaust system. The flows in the power turbine and the nonaxisymmetric exhaust volute are closely coupled and inherently unsteady. The flow interactions between the power turbine and the exhaust volute have a significant influence on the shrouded rotor blade aerodynamic forces. However, the interactions have not been taken into account properly in current power turbine design approaches. The present study aims to investigate the flow interactions between the last stage of a shrouded power turbine and the nonaxisymmetric exhaust volute with struts. Special attention is given to the coupled aerodynamics and pressure response studies. This work was carried out using coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations with the computational domain including a stator vane, 76 shrouded rotor blades, 9 struts and an exhaust volute. Three-dimensional (3D) unsteady and steady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solutions in conjunction with a Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model are utilized to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of shrouded rotors and an exhaust volute using a commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent 14.0. The asymmetric flow fields are analyzed in detail; as are the unsteady pressures on the shrouded rotor blade. In addition, the unsteady total pressures at the volute outlet is also analyzed without consideration of the upstream turbine effects. Results show that the flows in the nonaxisymmetric exhaust volute are inherently unsteady; for the studied turbine-exhaust configuration the nonaxisymmetric back-pressure induced by the downstream volute leads to the local flow varying for each shrouded blade and low frequency fluctuations in the blade force. Detailed results from this investigation are presented and discussed in this paper.


Author(s):  
Michele Vascellari ◽  
Re´my De´nos ◽  
Rene´ Van den Braembussche

In transonic turbine stages, the exit static pressure field of the vane is highly non-uniform in the pitchwise direction. The rotor traverses periodically this non-uniform field and large static pressure fluctuations are observed around the rotor section. As a consequence the rotor blade is submitted to significant variations of its aerodynamic force. This contributes to the high cycle fatigue and may result in unexpected blade failure. In this paper an existing transonic turbine stage section is redesigned in the view of reducing the rotor stator interaction, and in particular the unsteady rotor blade forcing. The first step is the redesign of the stator blade profile to reduce the stator exit pitchwise static pressure gradient. For this purpose, a procedure using a genetic algorithm and an artificial neural network is used. Next, two new rotor profiles are designed and analysed with a quasi 3D Euler unsteady solver in order to investigate their receptivity to the shock interaction. One of the new profiles allows reducing the blade force variation by 50%.


Author(s):  
Xin Yuan ◽  
Tadashi Tanuma ◽  
Xiaofeng Zhu ◽  
Zhirong Lin ◽  
Daisuke Nomura

An advanced aerodynamic design optimization system for steam turbine stages considering rotor blade tip leakage and blade end-wall non-axis-symmetric contouring has been developed. Using this system, fluid dynamic optimizations were carried out for a steam turbine stage with stator and rotor blades. The system includes parametric modeling of blade and end-wall contouring, evaluation system with in-house or package CFD software and optimization strategy module. The designs of rotor blade and hub end-wall surface in a typical large-scale high-pressure steam turbine stage were optimized in order to know this design optimization impact on enhancing the stage efficiency. Results show that: from the current well designed high pressure steam turbine stage, the demonstrated efficiency enhancement with the present optimum design is around 0.2% under consideration of rotor tip leakage. Design cycle could be greatly shortened by parallel optimization algorithm and cluster PC, and especially four days could be sufficient for an optimization with one thousand iterations on 20 CPUs of 2.0G cluster PC.


Author(s):  
Irving Fruchtman

Fundamental concepts are given for the design of a turbine stage with supersonic gas velocities relative to the blading. Minimum-length nozzles (stators) and free-vortex-type rotor blades are specified and a correlation of their published performance is given. A blade selection chart is given to provide a method for obtaining appropriate low-loss rotor blade configurations. A series of two-dimensional cascade experiments are described in which the performance of film-cooled, blunted leading-edge rotor blades were measured. Blade performance is given over a range of inlet Mach numbers and cooling flows.


Author(s):  
V.D. Molyakov ◽  
B.A. Kunikeev

At present, in the promising development of gas turbine engines compared to at least the fourth generation products, there have been significant changes in the approaches to the design of engine. First of all, it is an increase in maximum values of temperature, gas pressure and circumferential flow speeds, an increase in power of the turbine stage, as well as improvement of the turbine manufacturing technology. All these factors lead to the fact that when designing the flow parts of the gas turbine, it is necessary at the fixed design flow rate of the working medium in the engine, i.e. at the fixed diameters, lengths of the nozzle and rotor blades forming the outline of the inter-blade channels, to increase the blade chords with the corresponding reduction of the number of blades in the row. The increase in turbine stage power associated with the increase in temperature, pressure (density), and circumferential velocity increases the bending stresses leading to the need to increase chords at a fixed blade length. Significant reduction of number of blades in stages, simplifies technology of blades manufacturing. A substantial increase in the maximum gas temperature, in the perspective of more than 2000 K, also leads to the need to increase the blade chords, due to the need to place cooling cavities in the blades. As a result, contradictions arise with the use of similarity theory in the design of stages of turbines of different purpose, as some of the main requirements of similarity are violated — geometric similarity of blade channels of the flow part and then the use of the generally accepted number Re by the chord of blades loses meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out detailed investigations of all flow parameters in four stages of turbines with detection of influence of change of rotor blade chords at equal length of blades. And justify the effect of change of rotor blade chords on physical processes in flow parts of turbines in engines of various purpose.


Author(s):  
R. De´nos ◽  
G. Paniagua

This experimental research investigates the influence of the hub endwall cavity flow on the aerodynamics and heat transfer of a high-pressure transonic turbine stage tested under engine representative conditions. The measurements include the hub and tip endwall static pressure downstream of the vane, the static pressure and heat transfer on the rotor blade at 15% span and on the hub platform as well as the stage downstream total pressure and temperature. Both steady and unsteady aspects are addressed. The hub endwall cavity flow has a significant influence on both the time-averaged and time-resolved components of the measured quantities. The effects are shown to be mainly due to an increase of the pitchwise averaged static pressure at hub downstream of the vane when cavity flow ejection is activated.


Author(s):  
Srikanth Deshpande ◽  
Marcus Thern ◽  
Magnus Genrup

The present work approaches the idea of increasing the efficiency of an industrial steam turbine stage. For this endeavor, an industrial steam turbine stage comprising of prismatic stator and rotor is considered. With the velocity triangles as input, airfoil design is carried out. Firstly, the rotor is redesigned to take care of any incidence issues in the baseline case. In rotor blades, the peak Mach number is reduced in blade to blade flow passage and hence, efficiency of stage is increased. Rotor is made front loaded. After finalizing the rotor, the stator is redesigned. Stator is made more aft-loaded when compared to the baseline case. By making the stator aft-loaded, the efficiency increased by reducing profile losses. This design modification also showed advantage in secondary losses. The total pressure loss in the stator was reduced by a delta of 0.15. When creating an airfoil for stator or rotor, MISES was used in order to evaluate profile losses. The design verification for the stage was numerically done using commercial CFD software ANSYS CFX. Steady state RANS simulations were carried out. The stator and the rotor still being prismatic, only by virtue of airfoil design, the total to total stage efficiency improvement of 0.33% was predicted.


Author(s):  
Özhan H. Turgut ◽  
Cengiz Camcı

Three different ways are employed in the present paper to reduce the secondary flow related total pressure loss. These are nonaxisymmetric endwall contouring, leading edge (LE) fillet, and the combination of these two approaches. Experimental investigation and computational simulations are applied for the performance assessments. The experiments are carried out in the Axial Flow Turbine Research Facility (AFTRF) having a diameter of 91.66cm. The NGV exit flow structure was examined under the influence of a 29 bladed high pressure turbine rotor assembly operating at 1300 rpm. For the experimental measurement comparison, a reference Flat Insert endwall is installed in the nozzle guide vane (NGV) passage. It has a constant thickness with a cylindrical surface and is manufactured by a stereolithography (SLA) method. Four different LE fillets are designed, and they are attached to both cylindrical Flat Insert and the contoured endwall. Total pressure measurements are taken at rotor inlet plane with Kiel probe. The probe traversing is completed with one vane pitch and from 8% to 38% span. For one of the designs, area averaged loss is reduced by 15.06%. The simulation estimated this reduction as 7.11%. Computational evaluation is performed with the rotating domain and the rim seal flow between the NGV and the rotor blades. The most effective design reduced the mass averaged loss by 1.28% over the whole passage at the NGV exit.


2000 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maik Tiedemann ◽  
Friedrich Kost

This investigation is aimed at an experimental determination of the unsteady flowfield downstream of a transonic high pressure turbine stage. The single stage measurements, which were part of a joined European project, were conducted in the windtunnel for rotating cascades of the DLR Go¨ttingen. Laser-2-focus (L2F) measurements were carried out in order to determine the Mach number, flow angle, and turbulence distributions. Furthermore, a fast response pitot probe was utilized to determine the total pressure distribution. The measurement position for both systems was 0.5 axial rotor chord downstream of the rotor trailing edge at midspan. While the measurement position remained fixed, the nozzle guide vane (NGV) was “clocked” to 12 positions covering one NGV pitch. The periodic fluctuations of the total pressure downstream of the turbine stage indicate that the NGV wake damps the total pressure fluctuations caused by the rotor wakes. Furthermore, the random fluctuations are significantly lower in the NGV wake affected region. Similar conclusions were drawn from the L2F turbulence data. Since the location of the interaction between NGV wake and rotor wake is determined by the NGV position, the described effects are potential causes for the benefits of “stator clocking” which have been observed by many researchers.


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