Flow characteristic of a multistage radial turbine for supercritical compressed air energy storage system

Abstract

Compressed air in supercritical compressed air energy storage system expand from supercritical to atmospheric conditions at lower inlet temperature (<500 K) to generate MW scale power. Therefore, a new multistage radial turbine is adopted and the flow characteristic is investigated by numerical simulation. Effects of ideal gas model and tip clearance on the performance and flow field of the multistage turbine are revealed. Results show that ideal gas model can reveal flow pattern under supercritical condition correctly while leading to obvious deviation of isentropic enthalpy drop, entropy, and inlet-to-exit total temperature ratio. Relative differences for mass flow and efficiency are less than 2%, while the relative differences for output power reaches to 9.36%. For shrouded rotor, mixing of working fluid near hub, blade suction surface, and shroud is the main influencing factor of the flow loss in the rotor. For unshrouded rotor, leakage vortex promote mixture of the fluid deriving from the hub, shroud, and suction surface, and causes much higher flow loss in the channel of rotor. The rotors, which have higher blade height variation rate, present higher efficiency reduction when the tip clearance height is increased, which is because the proportion of tip clearance in blade inlet height increases with the increase of average aspect ratio, resulting in the increase of leakage flow at the leading edge of rotor blade. The pressure fluctuation near the tip clearance and efficiency reduction is also increased. The present study provides a reference for further design and optimization of the multistage radial turbines in compressed air energy storage.