Steady and Unsteady Numerical Characterization of the Secondary Flow Structures of a Highly Loaded Low-Pressure Compressor Stage

peer reviewedThis paper presents the numerical characterization of a highly loaded compressor by means of 3D unsteady RANS simulations. The focus is on critical flow structures and their evolution at different operating points of the machine. First, the numerical setup and mesh quality are presented to support the reliability of the provided results. The comparison against experiments is then described for this purpose. Later, a full description of the unsteady behavior of the machine is provided, giving special attention to the two regions where the most critical features are expected: the rotor hub wall and the casing. Rotor–stator interactions are then investigated and the role of the inlet guide vane (IGV) is finally discussed. Results are analyzed at design and near-stall conditions, with a focus on the behavior close to the stability limit at 100% speed

Experimental Investigation Of The Aerodynamics Of A Single-Stage High-Speed Low-Pressure Turbine

peer reviewe

Development of a Data-Driven Wall Model for Separated flows

Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are of increasing interest for turbomachinery design since they provide a more reliable prediction of flow physics and component behavior. However, they remain prohibitively expensive at high Reynolds numbers or actual complex geometries. Most of the cost is associated with the resolution of the boundary layer, and therefore, to save computational resources, wall-modeled LES (wmLES) has become a valued tool. However, wall models are not yet reliable in predicting the complex flow configurations occurring in turbomachinery passages. Most existing analytical wall models assume the flow to be fully turbulent, attached, flow aligned, and near-equilibrium. These assumptions no longer hold when different flow regimes and complex flow features coexist. Although significant progress has been made in recent years (e.g., non-equilibrium models using pressure gradients), they have not always brought a clear benefit for such realistic flows. This paper proposes an innovative data-driven wall model to treat separated flows. Among the many possibilities to solve this complex regression problem, deep neural networks have been selected for their universal approximation capabilities~\cite{hornik_approximation_1991}. In the present framework, the two-dimensional periodic hill problem is selected as a reference test case featuring the separation of a fully turbulent boundary layer. Gaussian Mixture Neural networks (GMN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) combined with a self-attention layer~\cite{Vaswani_sel_attention_2017} are trained to predict the wall-parallel components of the wall shear stress using instantaneous flow quantities and geometric parameters. The \textit{a priori} and \textit{a posteriori} validation of such data-driven wall models on the periodic hill problem will be presented.9. Industry, innovation and infrastructur

Machine Learning for wall modeling in LES of separating flows

Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are of increasing interest for turbomachinery design since they provide a more reliable prediction of flow physics and component behavior than standard RANS simulations. However, they remain prohibitively expensive at high Reynolds numbers or realistic geometries. The cost of resolving the near-wall region has justified the development of wall-modeled LES (wmLES), which uses a wall model to account for the effect of the energetic near-wall eddies. The classical assumptions of algebraic wall models do not hold for more complex flow patterns that frequently occur in turbomachinery passages (i.e., misalignment, separation). This work focuses on the extension of wall models to the separation phenomenon. Among possibilities to solve the complex regression problem (i.e., predicting the wall-parallel components of the shear stress from instantaneous flow data and geometrical parameters), neural networks have been selected for their universal approximation capabilities. Since DNS and LES perform well on academic and several industrial configurations, they are used to produce databases to train various neural networks. In the present work, we investigate the possibility of using neural networks to improve wall-shear stress models for flows featuring severe pressure gradients and separation. The database is composed of three building-blocks flows: (1) a flow aligned turbulent boundary layer at equilibrium; (2) a turbulent boundary layer subjected to a moderate pressure gradient; and (3) a turbulent boundary layer that separates and reattaches from a curved wall. These building blocks are referred to as a channel flow at a friction Reynolds number of 950 and the two walls (i.e., the flat upper surface and the curved lower one) of the two-dimensional periodic hill at a bulk Reynolds number of $10{,}595$, respectively. This work is constructed around three main questions: which input points should be considered for the data-driven wall model, how should one normalize the in- and output data to obtain a unified and consistent database, and which neural networks are considered