Theoretical and Numerical Analysis on the Temperature Drop and Power Consumption of a Pre-Swirl System

Abstract

As a component of delivering cooling air to turbine rotor blade at appropriate pressure, temperature and mass flow rate, pre-swirl system is very important to the cooling of turbine blades. It is attractive to the designers and scholars for its potential ability to reduce relative total temperature of cooling air as large as 100K. A pre-swirl system is actually an aero-thermodynamic system with energy transformation between work and heat. Theoretical analysis was carried out on an isentropic pre-swirl system to deduce equations for ideal temperature drop and power consumption. For an actual pre-swirl system, correlation between the actual temperature drop and power consumption was deduced, and a temperature drop effectiveness was defined also. Theoretical analysis shows that the system’s temperature drop increases linearly with the reduction of the power consumption. Numerical models were derived from a real engine pre-swirl system with small simplification. Standard k-ε turbulence model and Frozen-Rotor approach were applied in the three dimensional steady simulations. Inlet total pressure and total temperature, outlet static pressure, mass flow rate delivered to the blade and rotating speed of rotor were kept to be fixed for all the models. The influences of heat transfer and sealing flow coming from the inner seal were ignored in the simulations. Section averaged parameters like pressure, swirl ratio and total enthalpy were presented at each typical station throughout the flow path. The relationship between the temperature drop and the power consumption of all the models has been verified to be consistent with the deduced formula. For the pre-swirl system with low radial location of nozzle, these measures, such as adding impellers in the cover-plate cavity and inclining the receiver hole, were taken to reduce the power consumption and enlarge the temperature drop obviously. For this specific pre-swirl system, models with high radial location of nozzle are more recommended to decrease the loss caused by the large circumferential velocity difference between the airflow and the rotor.