Hot-Film Measurements on a LPT Linear Cascade With By-Pass Transition

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Transition of the state of the boundary layer from laminar to turbulent plays an important role in the aerodynamic loss generation on turbine airfoils. An accurate simulation of the transition process and of the state of the boundary layer is therefore crucial for prediction of the aerodynamic efficiency of components in rotating machines. A lot of the research in the past years dealt with the transition over laminar separation bubbles, especially concerning flows in low pressure turbines (LPT) of air jet engines. Nevertheless, by-pass transition is also frequent in turbomachines at higher Reynolds numbers as well as for properly designed profiles. Compared with transition over a laminar separation bubble, a by-pass transition is experimentally much more difficult to detect with standard measurement techniques. In such cases it becomes necessary to use more sophisticated techniques, such as hot film anemometry, hot wires or Preston probes in order to obtain accurate information on the state of the boundary layer. The study presented is carried out using a linear cascade with a LPT blade profile with strong front loading and gentle flow deceleration at the rear suction side of the blade. Measurements were performed at the High-Speed Cascade Wind Tunnel of the Institute of Jet Propulsion at engine relevant Mach and Reynolds numbers. Emphasis is put on the evaluation of the different transition processes at mid-span and its influence on profile losses. The data post processing was adapted for compressible flows, which allows a more accurate determination of the transition area as well as qualitatively better distributions of the wall shear stress. Finally, comparisons with simulations, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools, are performed and fields for improvement of the turbulence and transition models are identified.