Numerical simulation of unsteady flows through a radial turbine

Abstract

The article deals with the numerical simulation of unsteady flows through the turbine part of the turbocharger. The main focus of the article is the extension of the in-house CFD finite volume solver for the case of unsteady flows in radial turbines and the coupling to an external zero-dimensional model of the inlet and outlet parts. In the second part, brief description of a simplified one-dimensional model of the turbine is given. The final part presents a comparison of the results of numerical simulations using both the 3D CFD method and the 1D simplified model with the experimental data. The comparison shows that the properly calibrated 1D model gives accurate predictions of mass flow rate and turbine performance at much less computational time than the full 3D CFD method. On the other hand, the more expensive 3D CFD method does not need any specific calibration and allows detailed inspections of the flow fields.