Transonic moist air flows with release of latent heat by non-equilibrium condensation

Abstract

This study proposes a numerical method for solving transonic moist air flows with non-equilibrium condensation by taking FLUENT as the secondary development platform. The governing equations consist of moist air motion equations with an additional source term in the energy equation, which considers the effects of heat addition, and a set of four ordinary differential equations that are related to the generation of condensate mass. The moist air motion equations are solved using the standard features of the code in FLUENT, whereas the four ordinary differential equations are modelled using the user-defined-scalar transport modelling provided by FLUENT. This numerical method is validated both under internal and external flow conditions in a turbine cascade and over the NACA 0012 airfoil. Further investigations include testing the moist air flows in a compressor cascade channel and over the asymmetric RAE 2822 airfoil. The results show that the non-equilibrium condensation of moist air under transonic flow condition has a significant influence on the flow field structure and the aerodynamic performance of the turbine and compressor cascade.