Labyrinth seals on both rotor casing and blade tip as an effective method to control the leakage flowrate of the shroud and improve aerodynamic performances in a transonic turbine stage are investigated in this study. Compared to the case without the labyrinth seal structure, the cases with three different types of sealing teeth have been shown to reduce significantly the tip leakage flow by computational simulations. The double-side sealing teeth case reduces the leakage flowrate from 3.4% to 1.3% and increases the efficiency by 1.4%, which is the maximum efficiency improvement of all cases. The sealing structures increase the loss inside the shroud while reducing the momentum mixing between shroud leakage flow and mainstream. Therefore, the circumferential distribution of leakage velocity is changed, as well as the distribution of high-loss zones at turbine outlet. Furthermore, the leakage-vortex loss, which is associated with the blockage effect of sealing structure to the tip leakage flow, gains more improvement than the passage-vortex at the rotor outlet section in double-side seal case. In addition, it has also been found that with a larger gap at tip, the double-side seal has better effects of reducing the leakage flow and improving the aerodynamic performance in the transonic turbine stage.
Squeeze film dampers (SFDs) are widely used to dissipate mechanical energy caused by rotor vibrations as well as to improve overall stability of the rotor system. Especially turbomachine rotors, supported on little damped rolling element bearings (REBs), are primarily sensitive to unbalance excitation and thus high amplitude vibrations. To ensure safe operation, potential failure modes, such as an oil starved damper state, need to be well examined prior to the introduction in the ultimate industrial application. Hence, the aim of this research project is to evaluate the performance of the rotor support for a complete oil starvation of the SFD. An academic rotor dynamic test bench has been developed and briefly presented. Experimental testing has been conducted for two static radial load cases resembling the full load and idle condition of a certain turbomachine. Evidently, the measurement results exposed severe vibration problems. Even a split first whirl mode arises due to a pronounced anisotropic bearing stiffness. Moreover, for the least radially loaded bearing, highly nonlinear behavior emerged at elevated unbalance excitation. Consequently, the rollers start to rattle which will have a negative effect on the overall bearing lifetime. To explain the nature of the nonlinear behavior, advanced quasi-static bearing simulations are exploited. A number of possible solutions are proposed in order to help mitigate the vibration issues.
Bursting, an irreversible failure in tube hydroforming (THF), results mainly from the local plastic instabilities that occur when the biaxial stresses imparted during the process exceed the forming limit strains of the material. To predict the burst pressure, Oyan's and Brozzo's decoupled ductile fracture criteria (DFC) were implemented as user material models in a dynamic nonlinear commercial 3D finite-element (FE) software, ls-dyna. THF of a round to V-shape was selected as a generic representative of an aerospace component for the FE simulations and experimental trials. To validate the simulation results, THF experiments up to bursting were carried out using Inconel 718 (IN 718) tubes with a thickness of 0.9 mm to measure the internal pressures during the process. When comparing the experimental and simulation results, the burst pressure predicated based on Oyane's decoupled damage criterion was found to agree better with the measured data for IN 718 than Brozzo's fracture criterion.
To improve the performance of the afterburner for the turbofan engine, an innovative type of mixer, namely, the chevron mixer, was considered to enhance the mixture between the core flow and the bypass flow. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations investigated the aerodynamic performances and combustion characteristics of the chevron mixer inside a typical afterburner. Three types of mixer, namely, CC (chevrons tilted into core flow), CB (chevrons tilted into bypass flow), and CA (chevrons tilted into core flow and bypass flow alternately), respectively, were studied on the aerodynamic performances of mixing process. The chevrons arrangement has significant effect on the mixing characteristics and the CA mode seems to be advantageous for the generation of the stronger streamwise vortices with lower aerodynamic loss. Further investigations on combustion characteristics for CA mode were performed. Calculation results reveal that the local temperature distribution at the leading edge section of flame holder is improved under the action of streamwise vortices shedding from chevron mixers. Consequently, the combustion efficiency increased by 3.5% compared with confluent mixer under the same fuel supply scheme.
This paper has experimentally and numerically studied the windage heating in a shrouded rotor-stator disk system with superimposed flow. Temperature rise in the radius direction on the rotating disk is linked to the viscous heating process when cooling air flows through the rotating component. A test rig has been developed to investigate the effect of flow parameters and the gap ratio on the windage heating, respectively. Experimental results were obtained from a 0.45 m diameter disk rotating at up to 12,000 rpm with gap ratio varying from 0.02 to 0.18 and a stator of the same diameter. Infrared temperature measurement technology has been proposed to measure the temperature rise on the rotor surface directly. The PIV technique was adapted to allow for tangential velocity measurements. The tangential velocity data along the radial direction in the cavity was compared with the results obtained by CFD simulation. The comparison between the free disk temperature rise data and an associated theoretical analysis for the windage heating indicates that the adiabatic disk temperature can be measured by infrared method accurately. For the small value of turbulence parameter, the gap ratio has limited influence on the temperature rise distribution along the radius. As turbulence parameter increases, the temperature rise difference is independent of the gap ratio, leaving that as a function of rotational Reynolds number and throughflow Reynolds number only. The PIV results show that the swirl ratio of the rotating core between the rotor and the stator has a key influence on the windage heating.

