Analysis of Gas Turbine Rotating Cavities by a One-Dimensional Model: Definition of New Disk Friction Coefficient Correlations Set

Reliable design of a secondary air system is one of the main tasks for the safety and unfailing performance of gas turbine engines. To meet the increasing demands of gas turbine designs, improved tools in the prediction of secondary air system behavior over a wide range of operating conditions are needed. A real gas turbine secondary air system includes several components, therefore, its analysis is not carried out through a complete computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. Usually, those predictions are performed using codes based on simplified approach, which allows to evaluate the flow characteristics in each branch of the air system requiring very poor computational resources and few calculation time. Generally, the available simplified commercial packages allow to correctly solve only some of the components of a real air system, and often, the elements with a more complex flow structure cannot be studied; among such elements, the analysis of rotating cavities is very hard. This paper deals with a design tool developed at the University of Florence for the simulation of rotating cavities. This simplified in-house code solves the governing equations for steady one-dimensional axisymmetric flow using experimental correlations, both to incorporate the flow phenomena caused by multidimensional effects such as heat transfer and flow field losses, and to evaluate the circumferential component of velocity. Although this calculation approach does not enable a correct modeling of the turbulent flow within a wheel space cavity, the authors tried to create an accurate model, taking into account the effects of inner and outer flow extraction, rotor and stator drag, leakages, injection momentum, and finally, the shroud/rim seal effects on cavity ingestion. The simplified calculation tool was designed to simulate the flow in a rotating cavity with radial outflow, both with the Batchelor and/or Stewartson flow structures. A primary 1D-code testing campaign is available in the literature (2008, “Analysis of Gas Turbine Rotating Cavities by a One-Dimensional Model,” ISROMAC Paper No. 12-2008-20161). In the present paper, the authors developed, using CFD tools, reliable correlations for both stator and rotor friction coefficients and provided a full 1D-code validation, due to the lack of experimental data, comparing the in-house design-code predictions with those evaluated by CFD.