Investigation of improving the hydraulic turbine cascade performance using non-axisymmetric endwall contouring

Abstract

Non-axisymmetric endwall contouring techniques have been widely applied in gas turbines; numerous papers and experimental studies have shown that it can significantly improve the overall performance of the turbine. This article first presents the non-axisymmetric endwall profile construction and optimization both for the rotor hub and shroud of a turbine drilling hydraulic cascade in the presence of an axisymmetric rotor, in order to improve the performance and investigate non-axisymmetric endwall contouring’s influence laws on a hydraulic cascade. Rotor cascade endwall design is studied by confining the axisymmetric variation near hub, shroud, and both endwalls. Endwall surface is parameterized with control points of Bezier curve, and control points are considered as design variables having a height constraint of 10%, 12%, or 15% span to move in radial coordinate. This methodology also combines Latin hypercube sampling with NSGA-II algorithm to obtain optimum solution. Computational fluid dynamics simulation results show that the non-axisymmetric endwall contouring technology applied to hub and shroud all realize an improvement in efficiency, while the NEW_S_15% has the best comprehensive performance and it causes an improvement of 1.52% in efficiency and 5.1% in torque. Off-design experiment shows that NEW_S_15% improves the output torque and efficiency as well even it deviates from design working condition, which proves valuableness of the non-axisymmetric endwall contouring technology.