Numerical Flow Analysis of a Partial Admission Turbine Using a Frozen Rotor Method

Numerical analysis of the partial admission turbine in the KARI turbopump has been performed. Flow field of the partial admission turbine is intrinsically unsteady and three dimensional. To avoid heavy computational efforts, the frozen rotor method is adopted in computation and compared with the mixing plane approach. The frozen rotor method can represent the variation of a flow field along the circumferential direction of rotor blades, which have the different relative positions to the nozzle with one another. It also illustrates the wake loss mechanism starting from the lip of a nozzle, which is not captured in the mixing plane method. The frozen rotor method has proven to be an efficient tool for the design of a partial admission turbine.