CFD of Vortical Flow in Turbine

Abstract

Vortical flow is one of the major sources for generating aerodynamic losses in a turbine blade passage. Therefore, a great number of numerical and experimental studies have been made to suppress the vortices actively or passively. In the present article, the vortices in a turbine and the losses were briefly introduced, and then the computational investigation on the effect of the slot injection from the tip platform of a turbine blade was described. It was indicated that (1) the slot injection has some potential to control the tip leakage vortex, (2) the small amount of injection flow rate can weaken the strength of the tip vortex, but the total loss increases, and (3) the large amount of injection flow rate can make the tip vortex disappear, but the loss near the casing wall increase.