Session: 14-02 Compressor Cavities 2

Paper Number: 128942

128942 - Experimental Measurements of Buoyancy Induced Flow in Rotating Cavities Under High Reynolds Number Conditions 

The buoyancy flow structure and heat transfer inside the rotating cavities of a high-pressure axial compressor is a well-known conjugate problem, the disc temperatures effect the flow structure and vice versa. This creates a particularly challenging environment to study experimentally and numerically as the system is: three-dimensional, unstable, and unsteady. Further, the vast timescale range between the flow structure and thermal transient on the discs prove impractical to simulate within a rapid design engine cycle. Recent work has shown a relationship between the temperature of the core of the rotating cavity and the heat transfer and how this is affected by compressibility, resulting in a critical Reynolds Number at which disc Nusselt number is maximum.

This work presents new experimental measurements of the radially distributed disc temperatures and axial throughflow of a rotating cavity at engine representative conditions under elevated test section absolute pressure. The axial throughflow temperature rise is also captured by shaft mounted thermocouple rakes, offering the opportunity for first-order energy balance estimates. By increasing the density of the throughflow air, this allows the investigation at rotational Reynolds numbers previously unobtainable within academic research facilities, providing new insights into this phenomenon and the relative interplay between the buoyancy-induced convection, at outer radius, and the forced convection dominated flow at the inner radius.

Presenting Author: Vasudevan Kanjirakkad University of Sussex

Presenting Author Biography: Dr Vasudevan Kanjirakkad is Senior Lecturer in Thermo-fluid Mechanics and member of the Thermo Fluid Mechanics Research Centre at the University of Sussex.

Authors:

Mark Puttock-Brown University of Sussex
Vasudevan Kanjirakkad University of Sussex