Cryogenic liquid turbine expanders have been increasingly used in liquefied natural gas (LNG) production plants to save energy. However, high-pressure LNG commonly needs to be throttled to or near a two-phase state, which makes the LNG turbine expander more vulnerable to cavitation. Although some work has been reported on cryogenic turbomachine cavitation, no work has been reported on designing a cavitation-resistant two-phase LNG liquid turbine expander. Motivated by the urgent requirement for two-phase liquid turbine expanders, an effective design optimization method is developed that is well-suited for designing the cavitation-resistant two-phase liquid turbine expanders. A novel optimization objective function is constituted by characterizing the cavitating flow, in which the overall efficiency and local cavitation flow behavior are incorporated. The adaptive-Kriging surrogate model and cooperative coevolutionary algorithm (CCEA) are incorporated to solve the highly nonlinear design optimization problem globally and efficiently. The former maintains high-level prediction accuracy of the objective function but uses much reduced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations while the later solves the complex optimization problem at a high convergence rate through decomposing them into some readily solved parallel subproblems. By means of the developed optimization method, the impeller and exducer blade geometries and their axial gap and circumferential indexing are fine-tuned. Consequently, cavitating flow in both the impeller and exducer of the two-phase LNG expander is effectively mitigated.
To improve the operating stability of a cryogenic liquid turbine expander, the influence of flow behavior on rotor radial force and critical speed is investigated numerically. At both design and off-design conditions, unsteady flow simulation is conducted in the entire expander environment where the physical model is constituted by a volute, nozzle, impeller and diffuser duct. The asymmetric flow characteristics are captured at both design and off-design conditions and they are responsible for the significant radial force on rotor. The radial component of flow-induced resultant force is calculated with direct integration approach and it is significant due to apparent asymmetric impeller flow. The influence of such radial component of flow-induced resultant force on the rotor critical speed is further investigated, where the flow-induced radial force is considered as an equivalent mass and superposed on the impeller mass integrity to obtain a resultant mass of impeller, which is used in the prediction of rotor critical speed.
To predict rotor critical speed, a finite element method is developed and incorporated into a FORTRAN code, and it is validated and then used to predict the rotor critical speed with and without consideration of the radial component of flow-induced resultant force respectively. The following is described: at both design condition and off-design conditions, the predicted critical speeds with consideration of flow-induced radial force are significantly below that without flow-induced radial force. The influence of impeller flow behavior on rotor dynamics of the turbine expander is not negligible.
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