An inverse inviscid method for the design of quasi-three dimensional rotating turbomachinery cascades

A new inverse inviscid method suitable for the design of rotating blade sections lying on an arbitrary axisymmetric stream-surface with varying streamtube width is presented. The geometry of the axisymmetric stream-surface and the streamtube width variation with meridional distance, the number of blades, the inlet flow conditions, the rotational speed and the suction and pressure side velocity distributions as functions of the normalized arc-length are given. The flow is considered irrotational in the absolute frame of reference and compressible. The output of the computation is the blade section that satisfies the above data. The method solves the flow equations on a (phi 1, psi) potential function-streamfunction plane for the velocity modulus, W and the flow angle beta; the blade section shape can then be obtained as part of the physical plane geometry by integrating the flow angle distribution along streamlines. The (phi 1, psi) plane is defined so that the monotonic behavior of the potential function is guaranteed, even in cases with high peripheral velocities. The method is validated on a rotating turbine case and used to design new blades. To obtain a closed blade, a set of closure conditions were developed and referred

Meridional Flow Calculation Using Advanced CFD Techniques

ABSTRACT Working experience on traditional Meridional Flow Solvers has revealed difficulties concerning both convergence and accuracy of the solution. These difficulties have been observed for instance in certain industrial applications where steep gradients of flow and/or geometrical quantities are present. Transonic flow conditions can cause extra difficulties. All these difficulties may be circumvented when advanced CFD techniques are utilized. A computational tool, suitable for the solution of the Meridional Through Flow equations for Turbomachinery applications is presented. Assuming that the flow is compressible and inviscid the governing equations are obtained using a streamfunction formulation for the pitch-averaged flow equations. Viscous corrections have been incorporated in the inviscid model in terms of flow angle deviation and total pressure losses. Governing equations, are discretized using body fitted finite difference schemes. An artificial density upwinding scheme assures convergence in the transonic region. Particular attention has been paid to the numerical integration procedure which is based on a preconditioned gradient method (GMRES). Calculation results for low and high-speed turbomachines are presented and discussed. NOMENCLATUR