Advanced predictions of blade flutter have been continually pursued. It is noted however that validation cases of unsteady CFD methods against experimental cases with detailed 3D unsteady pressures are still rather lacking. The main objectives of the present work are two-folds. First, validate and understand the characteristics of blade tip clearance, as well as a bubble-type flow separation for an unsteady CFD solver against a 3D oscillating cascade experiment. And second, examine the applicability of the influence coefficient method (ICM) as widely used in an oscillating linear cascade setup. In the first part, the capability of a widely used commercial solver (CFX) for unsteady flows induced by a 3D oscillating compressor cascade is examined. The present computations have shown consistently a destabilizing effect of increasing blade tip clearance, in agreement with the experiment. More remarkably, the computational analyses reveal a distinctive interplay between the inlet endwall boundary layer and the tip clearance in relation to the aerodynamic damping. Different inlet endwall boundary layer thicknesses are shown to lead to qualitatively different aeroelastic stability characteristics in relation to tip clearance. The aero-damping variation with the tip clearance under the influence of the inlet endwall boundary layer seems to correlate closely to a balancing act between the passage vortex and the tip leakage vortex. The tip clearance aeroelastic behavior seems also in line with a simple quasi-steady analysis. On the other hand, the mid-chord laminar bubble separation on suction surface, though with a clear signature in the local aero-damping, has negligible effects on the overall stability. The second part aims to examine computationally the applicability of the influence coefficient method in a linear cascade setup. The comparison between the cascade-based ICM data and a baseline “tuned cascade” shows that the differences in the sensitivity to the far-field treatment can be significant, depending on inter-blade phase angles. On the other hand, non-linearity effects closely relevant to the basic linear assumption of the ICM are shown to only have a small influence. The present results suggest that extra caution should be exercised when comparing a CFD-based tuned cascade model with a finite cascade-based ICM model, at conditions close to acoustic resonance. The resultant discrepancies may well arise from the inherently different far-field sensitivities between the two models, rather than those typical numerical and physical modeling aspects of interest (e.g., meshing, spatial and temporal discretization errors as well as turbulence modeling).

Accurate and efficient predictions of the steady and unsteady flow responses due to the blade-to-blade variation as well as due to the non-axisymmetric inlet distortion have been continually pursued. Computation of two problems concurrently has been rarely done in the past partly because of the need to perform whole annulus bladerow simulations, despite the advances in the current state-of-the-art methods with the phase-shift single passage simulations. The current work attempts to deal with this challenge by developing a new computational approach based on the principle of the multiscale method in the framework of a commercial solver (CFX). The methodology formulation relies on summation of the constituent source terms, each of which corresponds to a particular flow perturbation. The source term element corresponding to the blade-to-blade variation effect is linearly superimposed as in the classical Influence Coefficient Method. The unsteady flow field around a blade at any time instant depends only on its relative position to all its neighbouring blades, so that the influences of an arbitrarily mis-staggered bladerow can be computed efficiently. In addition, the source term arisen due to the inlet distortion is calculated based on the spatial Fourier transform. A key enabler is that the source terms can be pre-computed using a small set of identical blade passages. The source term is then propagated to different spatial and temporal locations ... Please find the completed abstract below.

Accurate predictability of high-pressure turbine nozzle guide vane aero-thermal performance is highly desired in the development campaign due to the exposure of the component to a frequent and high heat load. In this paper, the representative vane profile in modern aero-engines is numerically studied. Aerodynamics and aero-thermal validations of the blade profile have been performed in comparison with the available experimental data. It has been showed that a satisfactory agreement could be achieved with the use of the transitional turbulence model SST - due to its superiority in capturing the laminarturbulent transition. Sensitivity studies to the increase in inlet turbulence intensity, inlet endwall boundary layer thickness, and inlet total temperature profile have been performed to understand the impact of inflow conditions uncertainty on the aerothermal predictability. Increasing the inlet turbulence intensity increases the pressure surface heat transfer coefficient and induces an earlier transition onset on the suction surface. Due to the rapid decay of turbulence intensity in the numerical model, the use of an artificially high inlet turbulence intensity has been shown to be effective in the prediction improvement. On the other hand, the change in inlet boundary layer thickness influences the formation and strength of the secondary flow, namely horseshoe vortex and passage vortex. These secondary flow phenomena affect the local blade surface heat transfer coefficient in the near-endwall region although the most significant rise in heat transfer is found on the endwall. The temperature distortion amplitude of hot streak and its relative clocking position with the vane significantly affect the heat flux distribution. In contrast, the heat transfer coefficient is less sensitive to the change in hot streak conditions. However, it has been shown that increasing the temperature distortion amplitude could induce a larger difference among different clocking configurations. In addition, decreasing the difference between the fluid and wall temperature would delay the transition onset and stabilize the boundary layer. Further analysis of the unsteadiness effects has been carried out by comparing the steady and time-averaged flow solutions. It has been observed that the discrepancy between these solutions is attributed to the flow field nonlinearity. Thus, a significant discrepancy can be found in the laminar-turbulent transition as well as the trailing edge region. However, since the contribution of these regions on the total area-averaged heat transfer is small, their influences on the total vane heat transfer is limited. _____________________________ a) Contributed paper, published as part of the

The uncoupled phase-shifted single-passage simulation is commonly used for turbomachinery aeroelastic problems. However, it has difficulties in dealing with unconventional phenomena such as strong fluid-structure interaction effects as well as blade mistuning effects. Regarding mistuning effects, structural mistuning has been studied extensively while aerodynamic mistuning has received far less attention. There seems to be a lack of clear and systematic understanding of physical behaviour and mechanisms of mistuned bladerows, particularly in the context of the aerodynamic mistuning versus structural one. In the present work, direct fully-coupled method is adopted to investigate the dynamics mechanism of a mistuned oscillating cascade. Both structurally and aerodynamically mistuned cascades show that the blades would couple and oscillate at a unique frequency and a constant inter-blade phase angle regardless of the individual blade’s eigen-frequency. The vibration amplitudes of blades of a mistuned row are different when excited. For structural mistuning, the mode localization effect is seen to be responsible for a monotonic increase of cascade aeroelastic stability with mistuning. On the other hand, the aerodynamically mistuned cascade shows a stabilizing effect at small amount of mistuning but exhibits a destabilizing effect at large mistuning. Such non-monotonic tendency could be explained using the aero-damping decomposition by the influence coefficient approach. At low reduced frequency, there is a striking difference between the tuned and aero-mistuned cascade. Although the tuned cascade is stable, the aero-mistuned cascade may experience flutter. A close inspection of the aero-mistuned cascade flutter reveals that there are two oscillating waves forming a beating signal.

Advanced predictions of blade flutter have been continually pursued. It is noted however that validation cases of unsteady CFD methods against experimental cases with detailed 3D unsteady pressures are still rather lacking. The main objectives of the present work are two-folds. Firstly, validate and understand the characteristics of blade tip clearance, as well as a bubble-type flow separation for an unsteady CFD solver against a 3D oscillating cascade experiment. And secondly, examine the applicability of the Influence Coefficient Method (ICM) as widely used in an oscillating linear cascade setup. In the first part, the capability of a widely used commercial solver (CFX) for unsteady flows induced by a 3D oscillating compressor cascade is examined. The present computations have shown consistently a destabilizing effect of increasing blade tip clearance, in agreement with the experiment. More remarkably, the computational analyses reveal a distinctive interplay between the inlet endwall boundary layer and the tip clearance in relation to the aerodynamic damping. Different inlet endwall boundary layer thicknesses are shown to lead to qualitatively different aeroelastic stability characteristics in relation to tip clearance. The aero-damping variation with the tip-clearance under the influence of the inlet endwall boundary layer seems to correlate closely to a balancing act between the passage vortex and the tip-leakage vortex. The tip clearance aeroelastic behaviour seems also in line with a simple quasi-steady analysis. On the other hand, the mid-chord laminar bubble separation on suction surface, though with a clear signature in the local aero-damping, has negligible effects on the overall stability. The second part aims to examine computationally the applicability of the influence coefficient method in a linear cascade setup. The comparison between the cascade based ICM data and a baseline ‘tuned cascade’ shows that the differences in the sensitivity to the far-field treatment can be significant, depending on interblade phase angles. On the other hand, non-linearity effects closely relevant to the basic linear assumption of the ICM are shown to only have a small influence. The present results suggest that extra caution should be exercised when comparing a CFD-based tuned cascade model with a finite cascade-based ICM model, at conditions close to acoustic resonance. The resultant discrepancies may well arise from the inherently different far-field sensitivities between the two models, rather than those typical numerical and physical modelling aspects of interest (e.g. meshing, spatial and temporal discretization errors as well as turbulence modelling).