Influence of Unsteady Wakes on the Secondary Flows in the Linear T106 Turbine Cascade

Abstract

The present work extends previous investigations on the secondary flows around a steady and unsteady base flow to detailed time-averaged and time-resolved flow field measurements up- and downstream of the cascade. As a representative of modern low pressure turbine rotors of moderate aerodynamic loading, the LPT cascade T106 with parallel sidewalls was chosen for these investigations. Previous investigations have shown that the intensity of secondary flows in the endwall region within a first test set-up was fairly low due to the thin endwall boundary layer at the inlet of the cascade which impeded to study the influence of periodically incoming wakes on the temporal development of the secondary flow field. For that reason a new test-up was built providing a thicker inlet boundary. Measurements have been performed in the High-Speed Cascade Wind Tunnel of the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich under realistic Mach and Reynolds numbers. In order to simulate real turbomachinery situtations, a wake generator is installed generating temporally representative wakes in the inlet plane of the cascade by a moving bar system. The inlet conditions were determined using a hot wire and a Pitot probe. Detailed measurements of the three-dimensional flow field were carried out downstream of the cascade with a triple hot wire probe, a conventional five hole pressure probe, and a dynamic pressure probe equipped with a single Kulite sensor. All measurements were performed with and without moving bars. Based on previous investigations, a pitch of the moving bars of 40 mm and a circumferential speed of 20 m/s was chosen as the configuration with the highest influence on the secondary flow field. It is shown that the intended increase of the inlet boundary layer was achieved by putting plates on top of each other in the inlet plane endwalls. This leads to more pronounced secondary flow parameters in the spanwise distribution of the pitchwise averaged secondary flow angle (Δβ2,sec) and the secondary losses (ζ2,sec).