As overall pressure ratios increase in gas turbine engines, both the main gas path and cooling temperatures increase leading to component durability concerns. At the same time effective use of the secondary air for both cooling and sealing becomes increasingly important in terms of engine efficiency. To fully optimize these competing requirements, experiments at engine-relevant conditions are required to validate new designs and computational tools. A test turbine has been commissioned in the Steady Thermal Aero Research Turbine (START) lab. The test turbine was designed to be a 1.5 stage turbine operating under continuous flow simulating engine-relevant conditions including Reynolds and Mach numbers with hardware true to engine scale. The first phase of research conducted using the test turbine, which was configured for a half-stage (vane only), was to study hot gas ingestion through turbine rim seals.
This paper presents a series of facility benchmarks as well as validation experiments conducted to study ingestion using a tracer gas to quantify the performance of rim seals and purge flows. Sensitivity studies included concentration levels and sampling flow rates in flow regimes that ranged from stagnant to compressible depending upon the area of interest. The sensitivity studies included a range of purge and leakage flow conditions for several locations in the rim seal and cavity areas. Results indicate reasonable sampling methods were used to achieve isokinetic sampling conditions.
Driven by the need for higher cycle efficiencies, overall pressure ratios for gas turbine engines continue to be pushed higher thereby resulting in increasing gas temperatures. Secondary air, bled from the compressor, is used to cool turbine components and seal the cavities between stages from the hot main gas path. This paper compares a range of purge flows and two different purge hole configurations for introducing the purge flow into the rim cavities. In addition, the mate face gap leakage between vanes is investigated. For this particular study, stationary vanes at engine-relevant Mach and Reynolds numbers were used with a static rim seal and rim cavity to remove rotational effects and isolate gas path effects. Sealing effectiveness measurements, deduced from the use of CO2 as a flow tracer, indicate that the effectiveness levels on the stator and rotor side of the cavity depend on the mass and momentum flux ratios of the purge jets relative to the swirl velocity. For a given purge flow rate, fewer purge holes resulted in better sealing than the case with a larger number of holes.
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