Leakage Flow and Heat Transfer Over Shrouded Turbine Blades

In this paper a high efficiency labyrinth seal and the staggered labyrinth seal for shrouded blades was presented. The flows in the seal with single, double, and triple tip seals were simulated by solving the two-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) and a compressible k-ε turbulence model. A multi-zone technique was used to generate the grids in the complex flow channel. The calculation results showed that the presently proposed staggered labyrinth seal is more efficient than the typical one and the leakage flow rate is dominated by the minimum flow area and the pressure difference. Comparing the performance with the typical labyrinth seal, the present staggered labyrinth seal model can average the total pressure drop among the seals, while the typical one induces a sharp drop across the first tooth. It showed that the leakage flow rate varies as a function of the number of seals to the power of −0.45. For the cases of multiple-seals the space between two seals has little effect on the total mass flow rate. Finally, decreasing the wall temperature will result in an increase of leakage flow.