Effects of Tip Injection on Tip Clearance Flow in a Low-Pressure Turbine Stator Cascade

Author(s):  
Shaowen Chen ◽  
Zhihua Zhou ◽  
Tao Cui ◽  
Jinsheng Wang ◽  
Songtao Wang

Taking into account the tip leakage flow will cause the loss of a substantial increase, how to effectively control the tip clearance flow has become a current research focus. In this paper, the effects of tip injection in a low pressure turbine cascade with different injection locations, number of injection holes and mass flow rate are investigated in detail. The SST k-ω turbulence model on the basis of the Gamma-Re transition model is adopted to compute the three-dimensional flow in the cascade of a turbine cascade with tip clearance. The feasibility of a commercial computational fluid dynamic code was validated and the computed data showed a good agreement with experimental data. The effect of the tip injection locations at camber line is better than that of close to the suction side or the pressure side. The total pressure loss decreased significantly by about 22% by increasing the injection flow rate to 6g/s. The main purpose of tip injection for the control of tip clearance flow is not simple to decrease the mass flow rate of leakage flow. There needs to be a more reasonable tip injection scheme which must consider the unfavorable effects of flow blockage in the clearance, and the losses due to the mixing of injection flow with tip clearance flow and leakage flow with main flow are reduced in order to achieve the optimal effect of clearance flow control.

2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maosheng Niu ◽  
Shusheng Zang

A numerical investigation has been performed to study the influences of cooling injection from the blade tip surface on controlling tip clearance flow in an unshrouded, high-turning axial turbine cascade. Emphasis is put on the analysis of the effectiveness of tip injection when the approaching flow is at design and off-design incidences. A total of three incidence angles are investigated, 7.4°, 0°, 0°, 0°, and 7.6°, 0° relative to the design value. The results indicate that even at the off-design incidences, tip injection can also act as an obstruction to the tip clearance flow and weaken the interaction between the passage flow and the tip clearance flow. It is also found that tip injection causes the tip clearance loss to be less sensitive to the incidences. Moreover, with injection, at all these incidences the heat transfer conditions are improved significantly on the blade tip surface in the middle and aft parts of blade. Thus, tip injection is proved to be an effective method of controlling tip clearance flow, even at off-design conditions. Beside that, an indirect empirical correlation is observed to be able to perform well in predicting the losses induced by tip clearance flow at design and off-design conditions, no matter whether air injection is active or not.


Author(s):  
Wei Li ◽  
Wei-Yang Qiao ◽  
Kai-Fu Xu ◽  
Hua-Ling Luo

The tip leakage flow has significant effects on turbine in loss production, aerodynamic efficiency, etc. Then it’s important to minimize these effects for a better performance by adopting corresponding flow control. The active turbine tip clearance flow control with injection from the tip platform is given in Part-1 of this paper. This paper is Part-2 of the two-part papers focusing on the effect of five different passive turbine tip clearance flow control methods on the tip clearance flow physics, which consists of a partial suction side squealer tip (Partial SS Squealer), a double squealer tip (Double Side Squealer), a pressure side tip shelf with inclined squealer tip on a double squealer tip (Improved PS Squealer), a tip platform extension edge in pressure side (PS Extension) and in suction side (SS Extension) respectively. Combined with the turbine rotor and the numerical method mentioned in Part 1, the effects of passive turbine tip clearance flow controls on the tip clearance flow were sequentially simulated. The detailed tip clearance flow fields with different squealer rims were described with the streamline and the velocity vector in various planes parallel to the tip platform or normal to the tip leakage vortex core. Accordingly, the mechanisms of five passive controls were put in evidence; the effects of the passive controls on the turbine efficiency and the tip clearance flow field were highlighted. The results show that the secondary flow loss near the outer casing including the tip leakage flow and the casing boundary layer can be reduced in all the five passive control methods. Comparing the active control with the passive control, the effect brought by the active injection control on the tip leakage flow is evident. The turbine rotor efficiency could be increased via the rational passive turbine tip clearance flow control. The Improved PS Squealer had the best effect on turbine rotor efficiency, and it increased by 0.215%.


Author(s):  
R. Dambach ◽  
H. P. Hodson ◽  
I. Huntsman

This paper describes an experimental investigation of tip clearance flow in a radial inflow turbine. Flow visualisation and static pressure measurements were performed. These were combined with hot-wire traverses into the tip gap. The experimental data indicates that the tip clearance flow in a radial turbine can be divided into three regions. The first region is located at the rotor inlet, where the influence of relative casing motion dominates the flow over the tip. The second region is located towards midchord, where the effect of relative casing motion is weakened. Finally a third region exists in the exducer, where the effect of relative casing motion becomes small and the leakage flow resembles the tip flow behaviour in an axial turbine. Integration of the velocity profiles showed that there is little tip leakage in the first part of the rotor because of the effect of scraping. It was found that the bulk of tip leakage flow in a radial turbine passes through the exducer. The mass flow rate, measured at four chordwise positions, was compared with a standard axial turbine tip leakage model. The result revealed the need for a model suited to radial turbines. The hot-wire measurements also indicated a higher tip gap loss in the exducer of the radial turbine. This explains why the stage efficiency of a radial inflow turbine is more affected by increasing the radial clearance than by increasing the axial clearance.


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 309-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaojuan Geng ◽  
Hongwu Zhang ◽  
Jingyi Chen ◽  
Weiguang Huang

1993 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 376-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. J. G. Heyes ◽  
H. P. Hodson

This paper describes a simple two-dimensional model for the calculation of the leakage flow over the blade tips of axial turbines. The results obtained from calculations are compared with data obtained from experimental studies of two linear turbine cascades. One of these cascades has been investigated by the authors and previously unpublished experimental data are provided for comparison with the model. In each of the test cases examined, excellent agreement is obtained between the experimental and predicted data. Although ignored in the past, the importance of pressure gradients along the blade chord is highlighted as a major factor influencing the tip leakage flow.


2014 ◽  
Vol 599-601 ◽  
pp. 368-371
Author(s):  
Zhi Hui Xu ◽  
He Bin Lv ◽  
Ru Bin Zhao

Using blade tip winglet to control the tip leakage flow has been concerned in the field of turbomachinery. Computational simulation was conducted to investigate the phenomenological features of tip clearance flow. The simulation results show that suction-side winglet can reduce leakage flow intensity. The tip winglet can also decrease tip leakage mass flow and weaken tip leakage flow mixing with the mainstream and therefore reduce the total pressure loss at the blade tip.


Author(s):  
Fu Chen ◽  
Yunfeng Fu ◽  
Jianyang Yu ◽  
Yanping Song

In this paper, the control mechanism of the honeycomb tip structure on the tip leakage flow of a turbine cascade is studied experimentally and numerically, and the sensitivity of tip leakage flow characteristics to different clearance heights from 0.5% to 2% based on the blade span are mainly discussed. A flat tip is considered as a comparative case. The results show that a part of the leakage flow enters the tip honeycomb cavity, forming small-scale vortices and mixes with the upper leakage fluid, which increases the flow resistance within the clearance. In the range of clearance height variation investigated, honeycomb tip structure can effectively reduce the leakage flow, and reduce the size and strength of the leakage vortex, so that the loss of the cascade is reduced. At a large tip clearance height, the unstable split of the vortex cores causes the vortex in the honeycomb cavities near pressure side to grow in size, so that the vortex extends further into the upper gap, where the turbulent blocking effect of the vortices on the leakage flow is increased. However, due to the vortex movement and the mixing between honeycomb vortices and the upper clearance flow, there is no obvious advantage in reducing the total loss of the cascade compared to the small tip clearance height.


Author(s):  
A. Basson ◽  
B. Lakshminarayana

The numerical formulation developed here includes an efficient grid generation scheme, particularly suited to computational grids for the analysis of turbulent turbomachinery flows and tip clearance flows, and a semi-implicit, pressure-based computational fluid dynamics scheme that directly includes artificial dissipation, and is applicable to both viscous and inviscid flows. The values of these artificial dissipation is optimized to achieve accuracy and convergency in the solution. The numerical model is used to investigate the structure of tip clearance flows in a turbine nozzle. The structure of leakage flow is captured accurately, including blade-to-blade variation of all three velocity components, pitch and yaw angles, losses and blade static pressures in the tip clearance region. The simulation also includes evaluation of such quantities of leakage mass flow, vortex strength, losses, dominant leakage flow regions and the spanwise extent affected by the leakage flow. It is demonstrated, through optimization of grid size and artificial dissipation, that the tip clearance flow field can be captured accurately.


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