Abstract
In modern turbine rotors, tip-leakage flow is a common phenomenon that accounts for about 1/3 of the stage loss. Studies show that as the imposed load increases, a shock wave appears in the tip region, which causes a significant interference on the leakage vortex. In the present study, numerical simulations are carried out to investigate the influence of the shock wave on the loss and breakdown of the tip-leakage vortex. The obtained results indicate that with no effective control on the flow, the loss of the leakage vortex has an approximate exponential growth up to about 10 times as the outlet Mach number increases from 0.67 to 1.15 and the corresponding proportion in the total loss increases sharply to 30.2%. It is found that the stagnation position of the breakdown changes with the backpressure and the amplitude of variation along the axial direction is up to 0.13 Cx. It is inferred that the breakdown of the leakage vortex core may be affected by the periodical passing of downstream blade and the induced pressure fluctuation may result in additional vibration in this rotor blade. The leakage vortex is unstable in supersonic flow with a shock wave and it may transfer to a flow with a low-velocity bubble in its core region. It is concluded that the leakage vortex breakdown mainly originates from interferences of the shock wave, while the internal cause of such breakdown is the centrifugal instability of the vortex.
Highlights
Tip-leakage flow is one of the main sources of outlet flow distortions and aerodynamics losses in turbines, which is a common flow phenomenon that can occur in a high-pressure turbine rotor
Studies show that the leakage flow has a significant effect on the turbine aerodynamic loss, heat transfer and unsteadiness of the downstream flow field
Numerical simulations were carried out to study the effect of shockInwaves on thestudy, loss and breakdown characteristics of theout tip-leakage vortex
Summary
Tip-leakage flow is one of the main sources of outlet flow distortions and aerodynamics losses in turbines, which is a common flow phenomenon that can occur in a high-pressure turbine rotor. Studies show that the leakage flow has a significant effect on the turbine aerodynamic loss, heat transfer and unsteadiness of the downstream flow field. Further investigations [1,2,3] revealed that the leakage loss accounts for about 1/3 of the aerodynamics losses of the stage. The tip-leakage loss is inversely proportional to the blade aspect ratio and increases as the flow turning angle increases. The pursuit of high loading and small aspect ratio in the design of modern turbines leads to serious tip-leakage flow and loss [4]
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