Facility for investigating the flow in a low pressure turbine exit structure

This paper presents the design of a turbine facility for the investigation of the flow in the engine exit structure (EES) at Chalmers University. The EES is the structure located downstream of the low-pressure turbine in a jet engine. In the current facility, in order to generate realistic inlet boundary conditions for the EES, an LPT stage is located upstream of the EES. The facility is a large-scale, low-speed annular cascade, and the flow Reynolds number based on the channel height in the turbine stage is 465,000, which is representative for large turbofan engines. The design of the facility follows classical low speed wind tunnel design. Experimental correlations obtained from data collected in a previous rig and from previous studies in low-speed wind tunnels have been used to compute pressure losses. CFD has been used in the design of the facility.