Reduction of Tip Clearance Losses in an Unshrouded Turbine by Rotor Casing Contouring

Abstract

Tip leakage flow is responsible for a number of aerodynamic losses in turbines, and the mixing of tip leakage flow with the passage secondaryflowcauses significant losses. This paperpresents a numerical investigation of the effect of three types of casing contouring: 1) step, 2) trench, and 3) arc casings on aerodynamic performance of anunshrouded turbine rotor at design and off-design incidences, in an attempt to seek an optimal casing contour with the objective both of avoiding direct tip leakage in the tip clearance, and of efficiently using the interaction between the tip leakage vortex and passage vortex inside rotor passage, and then to reduce the total losses in turbines. The results show that the reduction in tip leakage losses obtained by the optimized casing contour significantly overrides the losses caused by the step in theflowpath. Introduction of casing step thickens the inlet boundary layer, which increases the strength of the tip passage vortex and hence suppresses the evolution of the tip leakage vortex. Step and trench casings provide the largest efficiency increase when the inlet flow direction is normal to the casing step while arc casing achieves the best performance improvement at the design incidence.