Blade aeroelasticity in transient operation of expansion turbines.
WP1.2: "Fluid-structure interactions under variable operating conditions".
The energy transition and globalization pose new challenges for the turbomachinery engineering industry. As the focus shifts away from traditional energy generation, other areas of application for turbomachinery are coming more to the fore. This is also accompanied by changed requirements for turbomachinery design in general and blade design in particular. Knowledge that is still lacking must always be conservatively compensated for by appropriate safety factors in the sizing and design process, which can ultimately lead to higher costs and lower efficiencies.
In the SchauTex AP 1.2 project, the effects of rotor-stator interactions on the aerodynamic stimulus at a front loaded and at an aft loaded blade design and their performance at different operating points are investigated in a combined approach of experiment and numerics.
The four-stage axial cold air turbine of the department is used as a test rig for the experimental investigations. The turbine test rig is equipped with a typical high-pressure steam turbine blading and features stationary and transient pressure measurement technology in selected blades in addition to several two-dimensional traversable probe accesses in measurement planes between the rotor and stator rows.
The results of the unsteady numerical flow simulations, verified with the experimental data, allow deeper insights into the flow and interaction mechanisms and views into places that cannot be reached by the probes of the test rig. This allows emerging phenomena to be better traced to their origins and assessed as they evolve.
Consideration of more complex phenomena, such as rotor-stator interaction, is not sufficiently possible in individual design processes, so generally applicable design recommendations must be derived from representative examples.