The benefits of turbine endwall profiling in a cascade

Abstract

Non-axisymmetric profiled endwalls have been shown to reduce losses and secondary flow both in cascades and in rig tests. This paper presents experimental results which quantify the benefits of loss reduction in the cascade with particular attention to accuracy. The paper compares the benefits achieved in experiment to the results predicted by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results show that both the experiment and CFD give significant reductions in secondary flow. A reduction of 31 per cent in secondary loss has been measured for the best case, but the CFD gives only a small reduction in loss. Previous studies on the planar endwall have shown significant areas of transitional flow, so the surface flow has been studied with the aid of surface-mounted hot films. It was concluded that the loss reductions were not due to changes in regions of laminar and turbulent flow.