CFD Analysis of the Unsteady Flow in a Two-Stage Axial Turbine

Abstract

Partial admission, which has the advantage of avoiding large losses while the turbine at low load operations, is widely used in regulating the power of turbomachinery. However, partial admission causes prominent unsteady flow, additional exciting forces and extra losses. Thus, it has great significance to investigate the characteristics of partial admission turbines. In this paper, efficiency and unsteady flow performance of a small two-stage subsonic axial turbine with partial admission are analyzed. Firstly, a 3-D model with four discontinuous equally-distributed nozzle blocks was built, and the computational grid, which only consisted of hexahedral mesh, was generated. Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations were solved by commercial software ANSYS-CFX and the RNG k-ε turbulence model was adopted. Secondly, to investigate the influence of admission modes, two partial admission modes (A-two diagonal valve opening; B-two adjacent valves opening) were analyzed separately and compared with the full admission situation (Mode C). Finally, the turbine performances in Mode A and B at other speeds (75% and 110% of rated speed) were analyzed and pressure distributions at three different heights (10%, 50% and 90% of the blade height) were investigated in detail. The results indicated that partial admission could cause extra mixture losses and lead to lower efficiency. Among these kinds of modes, full admission (Mode C) performed best in efficiency, and Mode B performed better than Mode A under partial admission conditions. Furthermore, strong non-uniformity was found in circumferential direction and large pressure drop occurred at the gap between two admission blocks due to expansion effects. The computational results also showed that the flow parameter fluctuations attenuated evidently in the downstream stages and the pressure vibration mainly occurred after nozzle stages. Strong vortices and backflow can be noticed at the pressure side of the active nozzle boxes. Additionally, the rotational speed has a great influence on the performance of turbine. Higher rotational speed led to bigger efficiency and smoother pressure distribution. And the alteration trend becomes slow at high speed.