Torque and energy recovery of a compressor disk cavity in gas turbine engines

Abstract

The torque generated by high-speed airflow has a beneficial impact on a compressor disk cavity with radial inflow. The purpose of this study is to investigate the torque and energy recovery of a compressor disk cavity with tubed vortex reducer (TVR) to improve the secondary air system performance of gas turbine engines. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the temperature and shear stress characteristics in the cavities. Furthermore, a mathematical model is developed for predicting cavity performance. The results indicate that the tubed vortex reducer can significantly improve the comprehensive torque and energy recovery efficiency of the cavity. As the swirl ratio decreases to 1, the wall shear stress and windage torque at the low radius decline fast towards 0. However, the topologic walls demonstrate that the airflow causes a strong differential pressure torque inside the tube, leading to that the tubed vortex reducer is capable of significant energy output. In addition, as the rotating Reynolds number and dimensionless flow rate increase, the torque and output power in the cavity with the tubed vortex reducer increase rapidly. However, changing the length and number of tubes does not have a significant effect on comprehensive torque. The relative average error between the mathematical model and the numerical simulation is only 7.9 %.

Keywords

• Compressor disk cavity
• Tubed vortex reducer
• Temperature drop
• Torque
• Energy recovery
• Mathematical model