A New Procedure for Simulating Unsteady Flows Through Turbomachinery Blade Passages

Abstract

This paper outlines the development of two new unsteady wake-blade row aerodynamic interaction models and a rotor-stator unsteady aerodynamic interaction model. These flow models take, as input, solutions from Adamczyk’s average-passage flow model to provide an initial guess as to the transport of vortical, entropic and potential disturbances through a blade row. The response to these disturbances is calculated using an unsteady code known as MSUTC. This code solves the full Reynolds-averaged form of the Navier-Stokes equations using a modified Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model. The code can run with and without the use of wall functions. The solver is an implicit finite volume scheme with flux Jacobians evaluated by flux-vector splitting and residual fluxes by Roe’s flux-difference splitting. A series of simulations will show that the CPU time for all three models is nearly two orders of magnitude faster than current rotor-stator numerical simulation models. In addition, because of the numerical efficiency of the models, routine execution of numerical experiments for gaining insight into the flow processes controlling turbomachinery blade row performance become practical.