Simulation of Particle Trajectories in Gas Turbine Components and Assessment of Unsteady Effects Using an Efficient Eulerian-Lagrangian Technique

Stefano Oliani (), Nicola Casari, Michele Pinelli and Mauro Carnevale
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Stefano Oliani: Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44122 Ferrara, Italy
Nicola Casari: Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44122 Ferrara, Italy
Michele Pinelli: Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44122 Ferrara, Italy
Mauro Carnevale: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 6, 1-25

Abstract: In recent years, CFD has proven to be a very useful asset to help with predicting complex flows in a wide range of situations, including multiphase and gas-particle flows. On this track, numerical modelling of particle-laden flows in multistage turbomachinery has become an important step in helping to analyse the behaviour of a discrete phase in gas turbines. Furthermore, unsteady effects due, for example, to rotor–stator interaction may have an effect on trajectories and capture efficiencies of the discrete phase. Unfortunately, computational times for transient simulations can be exceedingly high, especially if a discrete-phase needs also to be simulated. For this reason, this work reports a new method for the efficient and accurate simulation of particle-laden flows in gas turbine engines components. The Harmonic Balance Method is exploited to gain orders of magnitude speedup exploiting the idea that once the flow field has been embedded in the spectral basis, it can be reconstructed at any desired time. In this way, not only can the computational time needed to reach convergence of the flow field be dramatically reduced, but there is also no need to keep simulating the flow field during particle tracking. On the contrary, the continuous phase field can be retrieved at any desired time through flow reconstruction. This technique is conceptually simple, but, to the authors’ knowledge, has never been applied so far in particle-laden flow simulations and represents a novelty in the field. First, the implementation of the method is described, and details are given on how phase-lagged boundary conditions can be applied to flow and particles to further speed up the calculation. Then, some relevant case studies are presented to highlight the performance of the method.

Keywords: OpenFOAM; Lagrangian tracking; particle deposition; harmonic balance; turbomachinery; compressible flows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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