Unsteady flow simulation of the
Aachen experimental turbine

Dr Yao is part of the turbomachinery group of the Stanford ASCI team. His team has collaborations with UTRC,GE Aircraft Engine and Rolls Royce Allison for turbomachinery CFD. Computational techniques developed in aerospace turbomachinery codes will directly benefit the development of power generation codes as well.

He is currently developing and validating the flow solver, TFLO. The focus of the current research is to validate the unsteady flow in a multi-blade-row turbine.

The Aachen Compressor has a 1.5-stages (three blade rows). Geometry and experimental data was recently made available by ERCOFTAC. The unsteady calculation was performed on PSC's T3E.

For the simulation:

• The configuration is 6-7-6 (vane1-rotor-vane2, the real blade counts are 36-41-36) passages.
• Total number of PEs = 304 PEs.
• Simulation wall-time= 27.4 hours (1 full period)

A Showcase (SGI only) presentation reviewing this work can be downloaded by clicking here.

The following images and animations are derived from the computations performed on PSC's T3E and show the simulation of the turbine, vane deflection, and vortex shedding behind a circular cylinder.

	One period of rotation of the turbine annulus. (mpeg - 1.24meg)
	Pressure contours on a deflecting vane. (mpeg - 1.24meg)
	Flow within the Penn State Research Compressor. (mpeg - 1.24meg)
	Vortex shedding behind a circular cylinder, used to validate the flow code. (mpeg - 1.24meg)