Unsteady Flow in Oscillating Turbine Cascades: Part 2—Computational Study

Abstract

Unsteady flow around a linear oscillating turbine cascade has been experimentally and computationally studied, aimed at understanding the bubble type of flow separation and examining the predictive ability of a computational method. It was also intended to check the validity of the linear assumption under an unsteady viscous flow condition. Part 2 of the paper presents a computational study of the experimental turbine cascade that was discussed in Part 1. Numerical calculations were carried out for this case using an unsteady Navier–Stokes solver. The Baldwin–Lomax mixing length model was adopted for turbulence closure. The boundary layers on blade surfaces were either assumed to be fully turbulent or transitional with the unsteady transition subject to a quasi-steady laminar separation bubble model. The comparison between the computations and the experiment was generally quite satisfactory, except in the regions with the flow separation. It was shown that the behavior of the short bubble on the suction surface could be reasonably accounted for by using the quasi-steady bubble transition model. The calculation also showed that there was a more apparent mesh dependence of the results in the regions of flow separation. Two different kinds of numerical test were carried out to check the linearity of the unsteady flow and therefore the validity of the influence coefficient method. First, calculations using the same configurations as in the experiment were performed with different oscillating amplitudes. Second, calculations were performed with a tuned cascade model and the results were compared with those using the influence coefficient method. The present work showed that the nonlinear effect was quite small, even though for the most severe case in which the separated flow region covered about 60 percent of blade pressure surface with a large movement of the reattachment point. It seemed to suggest that the linear assumption about the unsteady flow behavior should be adequately acceptable for situations with bubble-type flow separation similar to the present case.