IMPORTANCE OF INLET TOTAL PRESSURE CONDITIONS IN EVALUATING PERFORMANCE OF NON-SYMMETRIC GAS TURBINE EXHAUST DUCTS

摘要

When highly non-symmetric exhaust ducts are installed on a gas turbine engine, the asymmetries result in a non-uniform circumferential total pressure condition at the inlet of the duct. When testing these ducts experimentally or computationally the correct inlet conditions are often not known or cannot be reproduced. To study the sensitivity of duct performance to inlet conditions, an experimental and computational study of a non-symmetric gas turbine exhaust duct that includes a 160? turn with an annular to rectangular transition, has been carried out over a range of inlet conditions. The inlet conditions varied include circumferential total pressure profiles and swirl. The experimental studies have been carried out in cold flow with several non-uniform total pressure inlet conditions. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) techniques validated against the experimental results, have been used to extend the range of inlet conditions beyond the range that could be obtained experimentally to those typical of an engine installation. Results show that the total pressure inlet conditions have a significant effect on the flow structure in the exhaust duct and that the performance of the exhaust duct degrades as the level of circumferential non-uniformities increase. However, trends in geometric optimization identified experimentally using cold flow and uniform total pressure inlet conditions are confirmed computationally with circumferential non-uniformities typical of actual engine operations. This suggests that although inlet conditions are important for determining the level of performance, the configuration of the optimized geometry is somewhat independent of the inlet conditions.