A comparison between the craig-cox and the kacker-okapuu methods of turbine performance prediction

Abstract

Two complete comprehensive loss correlations for estimating the efficienty of axial-flow turbines are examinated in this paper: the well-known Craig-Cox method, and the recent development of the Ainley-Mathieson method, presented by Kacker and Okapuu, which reproposes the validity of this approach. Firstly, a comparison is done by evaluating the losses in a number representative cascades, having various solidities, aspect ratios, Reynolds and Mach numbers. It is shown that the two methods are in good agreement for subsonic cascades having high flow coefficients, while significant differences are found in high deflection blades, especially for the secondary losses. In the second part, it is investigated how the choice of correlation affects the project of a turbine stage. A design procedure, automatically carried out by a computer program, was applied to a number of cases: the differences between the two solutions of the same project problem obtained by using the two correlations are discusses. Parameters like specific speed, expansion ratio and size parameter are used to generalize the results.