Research on Flow Characteristics of Supercritical CO2 Axial Compressor Blades by CFD Analysis

A supercritical CO2 gas turbine of 20MPa is suitable to couple with the Na-cooled fast reactor since Na - CO2 reaction is mild at the outlet temperature of 800K, the cycle thermal efficiency is relatively high and the size of CO2 gas turbine is very compact. In this gas turbine cycle, a compressor operates near the critical point. The property of CO2 and then the behavior of compressible flow near the critical point changes very sharply. So far, such a behavior is not examined sufficiently. Then, it is important to clarify compressible flow near the critical point. In this paper, an aerodynamic design of the axial supercritical CO2 compressor for this system has been carried out based on the existing aerodynamic design method of Cohen1). The cycle design point was selected to achieve the maximum cycle thermal efficiency of 43.8%. For this point, the compressor design conditions were determined. They are a mass flow rate of 2035kg/s, an inlet temperature of 308K, an inlet static pressure of 8.26MPa, an outlet static pressure of 20.6MPa and a rotational speed of 3600rpm. The mean radius was constant through axial direction. The design point was determined so as to keep the diffusion factor and blade stress within the allowable limits. Number of stages and an expected adiabatic efficiency was 14 and 87%, respectively. CFD analyses by FLUENT have been done for this compressor blade. The blade model consists of one set of a guide vane, a rotor blade and a stator blade. The analyses were conducted under the assumption both of the real gas properties and also of the modified ideal gas properties. Using the real gas properties, analysis was conducted for the 14th blade, whose condition is remote from the critical point and the possibility of divergence is very small. Then, the analyses were conducted for the blade whose conditions are nearer to the critical point. Gradually, divergence of calculation was encountered. Convergence was relatively easy for the modified ideal gas properties. Main output of calculation is a value of the mass flow rate, which was larger than the design value. However the discrepancy of mass flow rates between CFD and design reduced if the 3-dimensional effects are taken into consideration. Absolute velocity distributions, relative velocity distributions and static pressure distributions surrounding rotor blade and stator blade were obtained. The characteristics of these distributions were consistent with those of the fundamental theory and these analyses were justified.