Prediction of turbine rotor-stator interaction using Navier-Stokes methods

Flows in turbomachinery are generally complex and do not easily lend themselves to numerical computation. The flows are three-dimensional and inherently unsteady. Complicated blade geometries and flow phenomena such as separation and periodic transition from laminar to turbulent flow add to the numerical complexity. Nevertheless, the accurate numerical analysis of such flows is a problem of considerable interest and practical importance to the turbomachinery community. Much of the early work in turbomachinery flow prediction focussed on airfoil cascades. While such analyses of flows in isolated airfoil rows have helped improve understanding of the flow phenomena and have gained widespread acceptance in the industrial community as a design tool, they do not yield any information regarding the unsteady effects arising out of rotor-stator aerodynamic interaction. These interaction effects become increasingly important as the distance between successive stator and rotor rows is decreased. Thus, the need exists for analytical tools that treat the rotor and stator airfoils as a system and provide information regarding the magnitude and the impact of the unsteady effects. The focus a three-dimensional, time-accurate, thin-layer Navier-Stokes code that was recently developed to study rotor-stator interaction problems. A system of patched and overlaid grids that move relative to each other is used to discretize the flow field and the governing equations are integrated using a third-order upwind scheme set in an iterative, implicit framework. The code was used to simulate subsonic flow through an axial turbine configuration for which considerable experimental data exists. Grid refinement studies were also conducted as part of the code validation process. The current status of the research, along with planned future directions, are also discussed.