Aerothermal Analysis of a Turbine With Rim Seal Cavity

Abstract

This study presents the results of the aerothermal analysis of an axial turbine with rim seal cavity using conjugate heat transfer computation (CHT). The CHT computations were performed for a two-stage turbine with stator well cavity at the sealing flow rates between 0–2% of the main annulus flow utilizing the commercial solver ANSYS CFX. The results were compared with that of conventional uncoupled approaches in which a heat transfer coefficient is first derived from CFD solutions and then taken as boundary condition for a thermal conduction analysis of the solid domains. As it turns out, for the thermal load prediction, the global results obtained by CHT and uncoupled computations were similar, while with the increase of sealing flow rate remarkable differences emerged. In addition, the sealing flow significantly affects the thermal loading of the blade and disk as well as the strength of the secondary vortex. A negative incidence at the downstream rotor leading edge was observed along with the changing of blade loading due to the low tangential momentum cavity egress flow.