CFD Study of the Impacts of a Turbocharger’s Various Wastegate and Bypass Configurations on the Efficiency and the Flow Field of its Radial Turbine

Abstract

Turbocharger systems enhance the engine power and efficiency, reduce its pollution, and downsize the engine volume. As the significance of exploiting turbochargers in gasoline engines is surging among automobile manufacturers, the necessity of improvement in the system components becomes more critical. This paper investigates the impacts of a turbocharger turbine bypass and wastegate geometry alterations on the performance and the flow field characteristics via numerical simulations. The numerical method verification and mesh independence study are performed for the original geometry. The simulation results of the altered geometries indicate that better alignment between the bypassed and the bulk flows leads to higher efficiency of the turbocharging system. In addition, the bent or elbow-shaped and protruded turbine walls immediately downstream of the wheel are found to be unfavorable. It is also uncovered that if the wastegate shape and the housing walls are designed in such a way that the effects of ensuing vortices are minimized, it improves the stage efficiency, which is desirable for two-stage turbochargers. Furthermore, a novel manufacturable design is proposed in this study, which increases the efficiency and useful power by 19.9% and 6.7%, respectively.

Keywords

• optimizing
• turbocharger turbine
• geometry alterations
• simulations
• computational fluid dynamics