Flowfield Investigation of a Compressor Cascade at High Incidence—Part 2: Numerical Analysis

Author(s):  
Pavlos K. Zachos ◽  
Fabio Pengue ◽  
Vassilios Pachidis ◽  
Pericles Pilidis

The performance prediction of axial flow compressors and turbines still relies on the stationary testing of blade cascades. Most of the blade testing studies are done for operating conditions close to the design point or in off-design areas not too far from it. However, blade performance remains unexplored at very far off-design conditions characterised by operation under extremely low mass flows and rotational speeds which imply highly negative incidence angle values. In this work the development and validation against experimental data of a CFD model for predicting the flowfield in a compressor cascade at a highly negative incidence angle is presented. The CFD model has been tested for quite a wide range of Mach numbers, and an extensive analysis of the tools provided by the CFD code has been carried out. Several turbulence models have been tested, different meshes have been compared and various boundary condition sets have been applied to the model in order to achieve results as close as possible to the experimental data. The model is validated against the experimental results and the maximum observed deviation was found to be within reasonable order of magnitude. In addition, most trends of the properties of interest have been captured sufficiently, therefore the physical phenomena can be considered quite well predicted allowing the numerical tool to be used for further studies on similar test cases.

Author(s):  
Carlo Cravero ◽  
Mario La Rocca ◽  
Andrea Ottonello

The use of twin scroll volutes in radial turbine for turbocharging applications has several advantages over single passage volute related to the engine matching and to the overall compactness. Twin scroll volutes are of increasing interest in power unit development but the open scientific literature on their performance and modelling is still quite limited. In the present work the performance of a twin scroll volute for a turbocharger radial turbine are investigated in some detail in a wide range of operating conditions at both full and partial admission. A CFD model for the volute have been developed and preliminary validated against experimental data available for the radial turbine. Then the numerical model has been used to generate the database of solutions that have been investigated and used to extract the performance. Different parameters and indices are introduced to describe the volute aerodynamic performance in the wide range of operating conditions chosen. The above parameters can be used for volute development or matching with a given rotor or efficiently implemented in automatic design optimization strategies.


Author(s):  
Pavlos K. Zachos ◽  
Vassilios Pachidis ◽  
Bernard Charnley ◽  
Pericles Pilidis

The performance prediction of axial flow compressors and turbines still relies on the stationary testing of blade cascades. Most of the blade testing studies are done for operating conditions close to the design point or in off-design areas not too far from it. However, blade performance remains unexplored at very far off-design conditions, such as windmilling, characterised by operation under extremely low mass flows and rotational speeds which, in turn, imply highly negative incidence angle values. In this paper, the flow field generated by a 3-dimensional linear compressor cascade at a highly negative incidence angle and zero rotational speed is experimentally investigated using a pneumatic miniature cobra probe. The main objective of the study is to derive the total pressure loss through the blades at such a highly negative incidence angle. An overview of the blade geometry as well as of the experimental facility is given whereas the measurement strategy and the data acquisition technique are also presented. An uncertainty study taking into account the most significant factors affecting the quality of the results has been carried out. As shown by the measurements taken at specific positions downstream of the blades, the flowfield is dominated by highly separated flows on the pressure surface, which contribute to the increased values of the total pressure loss coefficient which seems to be weakly dependent on the inlet Mach number. The quantitative measure of the pressure losses at the extremely negative incidence angle examined can be considered to be a validation platform for correspondent numerical studies of similar flow conditions. Additionally, the experimental results obtained can be used to extend the applicability of the current pressure loss models, increasing the predictive capability of the through flow numerical approaches towards far off-design areas of component or whole engine operation.


Author(s):  
Wu Dong-run ◽  
Teng Jin-fang ◽  
Qiang Xiao-qing ◽  
Feng Jin-zhang

This paper applies a new analytical/empirical method to formulate the off-design deviation angle correlation of axial flow compressor blade elements. An implicit function of deviation angle is used to map off-design deviation curves into linear correlations (minimum linear correlation coefficient R = 0.959 in this paper). Solution of the coefficients in the correlation is given through the study of classical theories and statistical analysis of the experimental data. The off-design deviation angle can be calculated numerically. The approach requires only knowledge of the blade element geometry. The comparison among 2 classical correlations and the new correlation proposed in this paper shows the new correlation has minimum error over the entire range of incidence angle while classical correlations show high reliability only in a limited range. Experimental data in this paper is collected from NASA’s open technical reports. Rotors and stators are studied together. Considering there is significant deviation angle variation along spanwise direction, only data at 50% span is studied, if possible. The error among experimental data, statistical regressions of the experimental data, and numerical results based on the new correlation is discussed. It has to be noted that the influence of the flow condition other than incidence angle is only being discussed but with less break through.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nasser Shelil

Abstract. The aerodynamic characteristics of DTU-LN221 airfoil is studied. ANSYS Fluent is used to simulate the airfoil performance with seven different turbulence models. The simulation results for the airfoil with different turbulence models are compared with the wind tunnel experimental data performed under the same operating conditions. It is found that there is a good agreement between the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predicted aerodynamic force coefficients with wind tunnel experimental data especially with angle of attack between −5° to 10°. RSM is chosen to investigate the flow field structure and the surface pressure coefficients under different angle of attack between −5° to 10°. Also the effect of changing air temperature, velocity and turbulence intensity on lift and drag coefficients/forces are examined. The results show that it is recommended to operate the wind turbines airfoil at low air temperature and high velocity to enhance the performance of the wind turbines.


Author(s):  
Noah Van Dam ◽  
Wei Zeng ◽  
Magnus Sjöberg ◽  
Sibendu Som

The use of Large-eddy Simulations (LES) has increased due to their ability to resolve the turbulent fluctuations of engine flows and capture the resulting cycle-to-cycle variability. One drawback of LES, however, is the requirement to run multiple engine cycles to obtain the necessary cycle statistics for full validation. The standard method to obtain the cycles by running a single simulation through many engine cycles sequentially can take a long time to complete. Recently, a new strategy has been proposed by our research group to reduce the amount of time necessary to simulate the many engine cycles by running individual engine cycle simulations in parallel. With modern large computing systems this has the potential to reduce the amount of time necessary for a full set of simulated engine cycles to finish by up to an order of magnitude. In this paper, the Parallel Perturbation Methodology (PPM) is used to simulate up to 35 engine cycles of an optically accessible, pent-roof Direct-injection Spark-ignition (DISI) engine at two different motored engine operating conditions, one throttled and one un-throttled. Comparisons are made against corresponding sequential-cycle simulations to verify the similarity of results using either methodology. Mean results from the PPM approach are very similar to sequential-cycle results with less than 0.5% difference in pressure and a magnitude structure index (MSI) of 0.95. Differences in cycle-to-cycle variability (CCV) predictions are larger, but close to the statistical uncertainty in the measurement for the number of cycles simulated. PPM LES results were also compared against experimental data. Mean quantities such as pressure or mean velocities were typically matched to within 5–10%. Pressure CCVs were under-predicted, mostly due to the lack of any perturbations in the pressure boundary conditions between cycles. Velocity CCVs for the simulations had the same average magnitude as experiments, but the experimental data showed greater spatial variation in the root-mean-square (RMS). Conversely, circular standard deviation results showed greater repeatability of the flow directionality and swirl vortex positioning than the simulations.


Author(s):  
S Sarkar

The results presented here are part of a detailed programme measuring the aerodynamics of a high specific speed mixed flow pump impeller over a wide range of operating conditions, including its behaviour in the unsteady stalled regime. The aim is to elucidate the physics of the flow through such an impeller. The noticeable features are the formation of part-span rotating stall cells having no periodicity and organized structure at reduced flow and also the shifting positions of reversal flow pockets as the flowrate changes. Measurements of loss and its variation with span-wise positions and flowrates enable the variation of local efficiency to be determined. The overall flow picture is similar to that expected in an axial flow impeller, though the present impeller displays a narrow stall hysteresis loop almost right through its operating range.


Author(s):  
P. Gaetani ◽  
G. Persico ◽  
A. Spinelli ◽  
A. Mora

In the frame of the European research project RECORD, the flow field within a HP axial-flow turbine model was investigated experimentally for several operating conditions. A number of studies on stator-rotor interaction in HP turbines for subsonic as well as transonic/supersonic conditions were proposed in the last decades, but none of them compared different conditions for the same geometry. In this paper, the transonic condition is investigated and compared to three subsonic ones, in the frame of an entirely new experimental campaign. The research was performed at the Laboratorio di Fluidodinamica delle Macchine of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), where a cold-flow, closed-loop test rig is available for detailed studies on turbines and compressors. The boundary conditions resulted in keeping constant both the turbine inlet temperature and the stage outlet absolute flow direction; so far, while the expansion ratio was varied, the rotational speed was also modified accordingly. The analysis was performed by means of a conventional five hole probe in the stator – rotor axial gap and by a fast response aerodynamic probe downstream of the rotor. The local time-averaged and phase-resolved flow field was then derived and used to analyze the stage aerodynamics and performance. Results show that the stage expansion ratio has a dramatic impact on both the rotor aerodynamics and stage performance. In particular, Mach number effects are recognized in the stator cascade that passes from transonic to low subsonic conditions. On the rotor cascade the reduction of expansion ratio reduces significantly the Mach and Reynolds numbers and increases the incidence angle as well; the rotor loss mechanics as well as the vane-rotor interaction are greatly amplified. Correspondingly a significant variation of stage overall efficiency is recorded.


Author(s):  
James L Spedding ◽  
Mark Ho ◽  
Weijian Lu

Abstract The Open Pool Australian Light-water (OPAL) reactor Cold Neutron Source (CNS) is a 20 L liquid deuterium thermosiphon system which has performed consistently but will require replacement in the future. The CNS deuterium exploits neutronic heating to passively drive the thermosiphon loop and is cryogenically cooled by forced convective helium flow via a heat exchanger. In this study, a detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the complete thermosiphon system was developed for simulation. Unlike previous studies, the simulation employed a novel polyhedral mesh technique. Results demonstrated that the polyhedral technique reduced simulation computational requirements and convergence time by an order of magnitude while predicting thermosiphon performance to within 1% accuracy when compared with prototype experiments. The simulation model was extrapolated to OPAL operating conditions and confirmed the versatility of the CFD model as an engineering design and preventative maintenance tool. Finally, simulations were performed on a proposed second-generation CNS design that increases the CNS moderator deuterium volume by 5 L, and results confirmed that the geometry maintains the thermosiphon deuterium in the liquid state and satisfies the CNS design criteria.


Author(s):  
Gong Hee Lee ◽  
Jong Il Park ◽  
Je Hyun Baek

It is experimentally well-known that high anisotropy of turbulent flow field, which results from the complex shear and rotation effect, is dominant inside tip leakage vortex (TLV). With all this fact, the greater part of the numerical studies to deal with TLV have used an isotropic eddy viscosity model (EVM), and their predictions showed some disagreement with the measurement data. The main objective of the present study is to show the superior ability of the Reynolds stress model (RSM), which can naturally consider the effect of system rotation on turbulence via the rotational production term, over the isotropic EVM for predicting appropriately the complex tip leakage flow in axial type of turbomachines. To achieve this aim, the results obtained from steady-state Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes simulations based on the Spalart-Allmaras model, Renormalization Group (RNG) k-ε model and RSM are compared with the experimental data for two test configurations: a linear compressor cascade and a forward-swept axial-flow fan. This comparative study of turbulence models suggests that the RSM should be used to predict reasonably the complex tip leakage flow, especially in a rotating environment.


Author(s):  
Sangjo Kim ◽  
Donghyun Kim ◽  
Kuisoon Kim ◽  
Changmin Son ◽  
Myungho Kim ◽  
...  

New off-design profile loss models have been developed by performing thorough investigations on compressor performance prediction using one-dimensional stage-stacking approach and three-dimensional computational flow dynamics (CFD) results. Generally, a loss model incorporating various compressor geometry and operating conditions is required to predict the performance of various types of compressors. In this study, three sets of selected loss models were applied to predict axial flow compressor performance using stage-stacking approach. The results were compared with experimental data as well as CFD results. The comparison shows an interesting observation in choking region where the existing loss models cannot capture the rapid decrease in pressure and efficiency while CFD predicted the characteristics. Therefore, an improved off-design profile loss model is proposed for better compressor performance prediction in choking region. The improved model was derived from the correlation between the normalized total loss and the incidence angle. The choking incidence angle, which is a major factor in determining the off-design profile loss, was derived from correlations between the inlet Mach number, throat width-to-inlet spacing ratio, and minimum loss incidence angle. The revised stage-stacking program employing new profile loss model together with a set of loss models was applied to predict a single and multistage compressors for comparison. The results confirmed that the new profile loss model can be widely used for predicting the performance of single and multistage compressor.


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