Uncertainty Quantification of Leakages in A Multistage Simulation and Comparison With Experiments
Uncertainty Quantification of Leakages in A Multistage Simulation and Comparison With Experiments
Uncertainty Quantification of Leakages in A Multistage Simulation and Comparison With Experiments
Abstract
The present paper presents a numerical study of the impact of tip gap uncertainties in a multistage
turbine. It is well known that the rotor gap can change the gas turbine efficiency but the impact of the
random variation of the clearance height has not been investigated before.
In this paper the radial seals clearance of a datum shroud geometry, representative of steam turbine
industrial practice, was systematically varied and numerically tested. By using a Non-Intrusive
Uncertainty Quantification simulation based on a Sparse Arbitrary Moment Based Approach, it is
ISROMAC 2016 possible to predict the radial distribution of uncertainty in stagnation pressure and yaw angle at the exit
International of the turbine blades.
Symposium on This work shows that the impact of gap uncertainties propagates radially from the tip towards the hub of
Transport the turbine and the complete span is affected by a variation of the rotor tip gap. This amplification of the
Phenomena and uncertainty is mainly due to the low aspect ratio of the turbine and a similar behavior is expected in high
Dynamics of pressure turbines.
Rotating Machinery
.
Hawaii, Honolulu Keywords
April 10-15, 2016 Uncertainty Quantification — Tip Leakage — CFD
1
Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
2
Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College of London, United Kingdom
*Corresponding author: cosimo.mazzoni@eng.ox.ac.uk
Experiments were performed on 50% reaction blading at traverses over one blade pitch at an axial distance of 6 mm and
the design operation condition ( φ = 0.384 ). The key rig 17 mm downstream of the stator and rotor trailing edge tip
geometrical and operational parameters are presented in Tab.1. respectively (Fig. 1). The traverse grid was 37 x 37 uniformly
The blade parameters are taken at blade mid-height. The spaced points in both radial and pitch-wise directions. A
blading was designed to represent typical high pressure steam detailed description of the experimental setup is reported in
turbine conditions, and all parameters satisfy that condition. [28].
Only the Reynolds number, based on exit velocity and true
chord, is significantly lower than that in a real turbine. 2. TBLOCK DESCRIPTION
The rotor shroud cavities geometry and sealing
arrangement under scrutiny is described in Figure 2. This TBLOCK is a multi-block structured grid solver developed
configuration is representative of commercial turbine design as by John Denton [29]. This is a steady or unsteady RANS solver
it allows for the axial movement of the rotor shaft relative to and uses the finite volume method, with the explicit SCREE
the casing. The shroud forms a radial clearance of 3mm with scheme [30] for steady simulations and dual-time stepping
the casing. Using two approximately 0.75 mm clearance radial method for unsteady calculations. Turbulence is modelled using
seals resulted in an over-shroud leakage flow of approximately a mixing length approach. Laminar to turbulent boundary layer
2%. A representation of the three stages experimental turbine is transition can be modelled by assuming a laminar boundary
layer up to a specified point on each blade and end-wall surface
reported in Fig. 3.
To investigate the time-mean flow of the main passage, and a turbulent one downstream. The mixing plane approach
traverses were conducted using a five hole pneumatic probe. allows reversed flow across the mixing plane, which may occur
The properties were measured by performing full-span area near the end-walls close to the leakage cavities. To accelerate
convergence multigrid and spatially varied time steps are used.
Fig. 3. Representation of the experimental turbine
3. NUMERICAL RESULTS
3.1 Comparison with experiments
In comparing calculated and measured flow patterns it
must be remembered that the real clearance is not known with
great accuracy and that it varies significantly around the
circumference. In the experimental configuration, the shroud
forms a radial clearance of 3mm with the casing and the
average radial gap for seals is assumed to be 0.75 mm.
Predicted distributions of total pressure coefficient
downstream of the second and third stators and their
comparison with experimental results are shown in Fig. 6. Both
pitch-wise averaged profiles (left) and 2-D contour map (right)
are presented. The measurement plane covers one pitch from
3% to 95% span. As it can be observed on the pitch-wise
Fig. 6. TBLOCK – rotor and tip shroud grid structure averaged profiles, numerical simulations on both coarse and
fine mesh well reproduce the pressure levels and the main trend
The simulation was run in parallel using 72 processors. A fully along the span. A comparison between 2-D contours show that
converged unsteady solution initialised from previous steady TBLOCK calculations captured reasonably well the main flow
computations was obtained for 10 blade-to-vane passes. features, such as the locations and intensity of the main loss
Averaging of the flow variables was then conducted for a core and of the hub end-wall secondary flow, and the migration
further 10 blade-to-vane passes. The computational time towards the mid-span of the concentrated low momentum flow
required to complete one blade-to-vane pass for the finer mesh associated with casing end-wall boundary layers and leakage.
was about 7 hours.
Fig. 7. Measured and predicted total pressure coefficient downstream stator 2 & 3
Article Title — 5
span and end-walls loss cores, although their levels were
slightly overestimated.
Velocity field is analysed in Fig. 9 and 10, which show the
span-wise distribution of pitch-wise averaged values of axial
velocity (Fig. 9) and yaw angle (Fig. 10) at different
downstream stator/rotor locations. Numerical simulations were
in good agreement with experimental results in predicting
magnitude and directions of the flow downstream both vanes
and blades passages. In particular, in the region close to the
casing and the shroud exit cavity of the third rotor, TBLOCK
was able to reproduce the overturning trend in the main
passage flow angle caused by mixing of the leakage flow.
()
orthogonal polynomials ψ i ξ , such that:
4.2 Results
N P −1
( ) () ()
y x ,ξ ≈ ∑ α i x ψ i ξ Eq.1 Figure 15 shows the pressure coefficient distribution at the
i=0 exit of each row. The dashed red line is the standard deviation.
The uncertainty bars represent one standard deviation
superimposed on the mean pressure distribution.
Article Title — 8
quantification study therefore gives suggest a reason of this
disagreement between CFD and experiments: it can be
associated to a small variation of the tip gap in the machine
that is different from the CFD model.
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