Curvilinear element of the discontinuous Galerkin method designed to capture the labyrinth seal geometry exactly

Abstract

The present study applies the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method to a numerical simulation of a compressible fluid flow through a labyrinth seal. This paper is proposes a curvilinear hexahedral element, which is deformed in such a way that it matches the rotated walls of the labyrinth seal exactly. A numerical study is performed on the staggered labyrinth seal with two teeth on the rotor and one tooth on the stator. For numerical simulation, three computational meshes with different refinement are considered. All of the numerical simulations are performed for both stationary rotor and for rotor rotating at 50 Hz. The obtained numerical results are compared with results computed by the commercial CFD software Ansys Fluent.

Keywords

• labyrinth seal
• discontinuous galerkin method
• curvilinear element