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The efficiency of modern axial turbomachinery is strongly driven by the secondary flows within the vane or blade passages. The secondary flows are characterized by a complex pattern of vortical structures that origin, interact and dissipate along the turbine gas path. The endwall flows are responsible for the generation of a significant part of the overall turbine loss because of the dissipation of secondary kinetic energy and mixing-out of non-uniform momentum flows. The understanding and analysis of secondary flows requires a reliable vortex identification technique to predict and analyse the impact of specific turbine designs on the turbine performance. However, literature shows a remarkable lack of general methods to detect vortices and to determine the location of their cores and to quantify their strength. This paper presents a novel technique for the identification of vortical structures in a general 3D flow field. The method operates on the local flow field and it is based on a triple decomposition of motion proposed by Kolář. In contrast to a decomposition of velocity gradient into the strain and vorticity tensors, this method considers a third, pure shear component. The subtraction of the pure shear tensor from the velocity gradient remedies the inherent flaw of vorticity-based techniques which cannot distinguish between rigid rotation and shear. The triple decomposition of motion serves to obtain a 3D field of residual vorticity whose magnitude is used to define vortex regions. The present method allows to locate automatically the core of each vortex, quantify its strength and determine the vortex bounding surface. The output may be used to visualize the turbine vortical structures for the purpose of interpreting the complex three-dimensional viscous flow field, as well as to highlight any case-to-case variations by quantifying the vortex strength and location. The vortex identification method is applied to a high-pressure turbine with three optimized blade tip geometries. The 3D flow-field is obtained by CFD computations performed with Numeca FINE/Open. The computational model uses steady-state RANS equations closed by the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model. Although developed for turbomachinery applications, the vortex identification method proposed in this work is of general applicability to any three-dimensional flow-field.
The efficiency of modern axial turbomachinery is strongly driven by the secondary flows within the vane or blade passages. The secondary flows are characterized by a complex pattern of vortical structures that origin, interact and dissipate along the turbine gas path. The endwall flows are responsible for the generation of a significant part of the overall turbine loss because of the dissipation of secondary kinetic energy and mixing-out of non-uniform momentum flows. The understanding and analysis of secondary flows requires a reliable vortex identification technique to predict and analyse the impact of specific turbine designs on the turbine performance. However, literature shows a remarkable lack of general methods to detect vortices and to determine the location of their cores and to quantify their strength. This paper presents a novel technique for the identification of vortical structures in a general 3D flow field. The method operates on the local flow field and it is based on a triple decomposition of motion proposed by Kolář. In contrast to a decomposition of velocity gradient into the strain and vorticity tensors, this method considers a third, pure shear component. The subtraction of the pure shear tensor from the velocity gradient remedies the inherent flaw of vorticity-based techniques which cannot distinguish between rigid rotation and shear. The triple decomposition of motion serves to obtain a 3D field of residual vorticity whose magnitude is used to define vortex regions. The present method allows to locate automatically the core of each vortex, quantify its strength and determine the vortex bounding surface. The output may be used to visualize the turbine vortical structures for the purpose of interpreting the complex three-dimensional viscous flow field, as well as to highlight any case-to-case variations by quantifying the vortex strength and location. The vortex identification method is applied to a high-pressure turbine with three optimized blade tip geometries. The 3D flow-field is obtained by CFD computations performed with Numeca FINE/Open. The computational model uses steady-state RANS equations closed by the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model. Although developed for turbomachinery applications, the vortex identification method proposed in this work is of general applicability to any three-dimensional flow-field.
The optimization of the turbine rotor tip geometry remains a vital opportunity to create more efficient and durable engines. Balancing the aerodynamic and thermal aspects, while maintaining the mechanical integrity is key to reshape one of the most vulnerable and life determining parts of the entire turbine. The ever-increasing turbine gas temperatures, combined with the difficulty of cooling the tip and the aerodynamically penalizing nature of the overtip leakage vortex, makes the design of the tip a truly multi-disciplinary challenge. While many earlier efforts focused on uncooled geometries, or studied the aerothermal impact with a fixed cooling configuration, the current paper presents the outcome of a multi-objective optimization where both the squealer rim geometry as well as the cooling injection pattern was allowed to vary simultaneously. This study explores a significantly wider design space, seeking a further synergistic aerothermal benefit through the combination of a quasi-fully arbitrary cooling arrangement, with mutating squealer rim structures. Specifically, the current manuscript presents the results of over 330 cooled and uncooled squealer tip geometries. The high pressure turbine tip was automatically altered using a novel parametrization strategy adopting a maximum of 40 design variables to vary the squealer rim structures, as well as the size and location of the various cooling holes. The aerodynamic and thermal characteristics of every design were evaluated through Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes CFD simulations with the k-ω SST model for the turbulence closure, adopting an unstructured hexahedral grid typically containing more than 8 million cells. A multi-objective differential evolution algorithm was used to obtain a Pareto front of designs which maximize the aerodynamic efficiency, while minimizing the overtip thermal loads. Eventually, a detailed investigation and robustness study was performed on a set of prime squealer geometries, to further investigate the aerodynamic flow topology, and the effect of various cooling injection schemes on the heat transfer patterns.
In this study, a turbine squealer tip is optimized by a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) with varying the squealer heights and the tip cooling configurations. The three objectives selected are the aerodynamic efficiency, the film cooling effectiveness and the surface fluid temperature variance. The multi-scale methodology is implemented to reduce the computational cost and to skip the meshing of cooling holes. Two optimization approaches are compared: a) a conventional method that optimizes an uncooled shape first and then the cooling configuration sequentially, and b) a method that optimize shaping and cooling concurrently. The concurrent method is found to obtain a heat transfer performance that is not achieved by the conventional optimization. Moreover, by adding the cooling, the performance ranking of the uncooled blades in terms of the aerodynamic efficiency is changed. These observations are due to the strong interaction between the coolant and the tip leakage flow. They indicate that the coolant injected at the tip is not passive as expected in the conventional film cooling designs. By altering the tip leakage flow structure, the coolant can reduce the tip leakage loss, which contradicts the conventional wisdom that the added coolant should always lead to extra losses due to the extra mixing. More detailed observations of the flow field indicate that the influence of the squealer height towards the aerodynamic efficiency is caused by two competing effects: the blockage effect to reduce the tip leakage mass flow rate and the sudden expansion loss effect to generate additional losses. The heat transfer performance can be significantly influenced by increasing the squealer height because of the trapped coolant in the cavity.
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