PREDICTION OF TURBOMACHINERY FLOW PHYSICS FROM CFD – REVIEW OF RECENT COMPUTATIONS OF APPACET TEST CASES

Abstract

In order to maintain a competitive edge, the turbomachinery industry has to rely increasingly on design and analysis methods based on numerical simulation of flow. The European funded APPACET was set up to study the application of turbulence modelling and the simulation of unsteady interactions to provide guidelines for the application of CFD to design. This paper shows the results of computations of four of the test cases studied by the project. The importance of grid refinement has been clearly demonstrated, but no evidence was found that one family of turbulence models could be definitely better than the other. Compared to steady results, unsteady time-averaged solutions have not shown any major improvement in accuracy. However unsteady flow phenomena generating losses within each blade row have been captured and partly explained.