Detailed study of the rotor-stator interaction phenomenon in a moving cascade of airfoils

In turbomachinery the Rotor-Stator Interaction (RSI) is an important phenomenon that has a strong influence on the machine behavior. These interactions can have a significant impact on the vibrational and acoustical characteristics of the machine. Unsteadiness and turbulence play a fundamental role in complex flow structure and the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is becoming a usual requirement in design in turbomachinery due to the difficulties and high cost of the necessary experiments needed to identify RSI phenomena. The flow inside a turbomachinery working under design condition is complex but apparently, when working under off-design conditions, it becomes more complex due to the boundary layer separation phenomena. Therefore, the choice of an appropriate turbulence model is far from trivial and a suitable turbulence modeling plays a very important role for successful CFD results. In this work the RSI generated between a moving cascade of blades and fixed flat plate located downstream were studied by means of CFD modeling and compared against experimental results. Design and off-design conditions were modeled and a detailed comparison between them has been made. To analyze in detail the flow pattern, mean velocities in the boundary layer were obtained and compared against experimental results. Furthermore, results concerning to turbulence intensity were compared against an experimental database. It was observed that for each operating condition, the flow in the cascade show special features. For flow inside the turbomachine under design conditions there is no separation, the wake is thin and the characteristic length of the eddies is small. For off-design conditions, there is a large separation and the wake is thick with large eddies. The results obtained can be used to obtain a deeper insight into the RSI phenomena.