Tip clearance

About: Tip clearance is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2637 publications have been published within this topic receiving 32671 citations.

Effect of tip clearance on performance of contra-rotating axial flow water-jet propulsion pump

Abstract: Insufficient understanding of tip clearance on hydraulic and thrust performance is a major problem encountered in the design and application of the contra-rotating axial flow water-jet pumps. In or...

Investigation for the Effects of Circumferential Grooves on the Unsteadiness of Tip Clearance Flow to Enhance Compressor Flow Instability

Abstract: The use of slots and grooves in the shroud over the tips of compressor blades, known as casing treatment, is a powerful method to control tip leakage flow through the clearance gap and enhance the flow stability in compressors. This paper presents a contribution to the understanding of the physical mechanism by which circumferential groove casing treatment manipulates the tip clearance flow’s unsteadiness. A series of computational studies were carried out to understand the physical mechanism responsible for improvement in stall margin of a high subsonic axial-flow compressor rotor due to the circumferential groove casing treatment from an unsteady viewpoint. Detailed analyses of the flow visualization at the tip have exposed the different tip flow topologies between the cases with circumferential groove and with untreated smooth wall. It was found that the primary stall margin enhancement afforded by the circumferential groove casing treatment is a result of the unsteady tip clearance flow manipulation. Breaking balance of incoming/tip clearance flow axial momentum by inducing the radial movement and tangential movement and delay the occurrence of tip clearance’s unsteadiness are the physical mechanisms responsible for extending the compressor stall margin.Copyright © 2010 by ASME

Unsteady tip clearance flow pattern in an isolated axial compressor rotor with micro tip injection

Abstract: A numerical study of the effect of discrete micro tip injection on unsteady tip clearance flow pattern in an isolated axial compressor rotor is presented, intending to better understand the flow mechanism behind stall control measures that act on tip clearance flow. Under the influence of injection the unsteadiness of self-induced tip clearance flow could be weakened. Also the radial migration of tip clearance vortex is confined to a smaller radial extent near the rotor tip and the trajectory of tip clearance flow is pushed more downstream. So the injection is beneficial to improve compressor stability and increase static pressure rise near rotor tip region. The results of injection with different injected mass flow rates show that for the special type of injector adopted in the paper the effect of injection on tip clearance flow may be different according to the relative strength between these two streams of flow. For a fixed injected mass flow rate, reducing the injector area to increase injection velocity can improve the effect of injection on tip clearance flow and thus the compressor stability. A comparison of calculations between single blade passage and multiple blade passages validates the utility of single passage computations to investigate the tip clearance flow for the case without injection and its interaction with injected flow for the case with tip injection.

Comparison of Predicted and Experimental Nusselt Number for a Film-Cooled Rotating Blade

Abstract: The predictions from a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes code have been compared to the Nusselt number data obtained on a film-cooled, rotating turbine blade. The blade chosen is the ACE rotor with five rows containing 93 film cooling holes covering the entire span. This is the only film-cooled rotating blade over which experimental heat transfer data is available for the present comparison. Over 2.25 million grid points are used to compute the flow over the blade. Usually in a film cooling computation on a stationary blade, the computational domain is just one spanwise pitch of the film-cooling holes, with periodic boundary conditions in the span direction. However, for a rotating blade, the computational domain consists of the entire blade span from hub to tip, as well as the tip clearance region.As far as the authors are aware of, the present work offers the first comparison of the prediction of surface heat transfer using a three dimensional CFD code with film injection and the measured heat flux on a fully film-cooled rotating transonic turbine blade. In a detailed comparison with the measured data on the suction surface, a reasonably good comparison is obtained, particularly near the hub section. On the pressure surface, however, the comparison between the data and the prediction is poor. A potential reason for the discrepancy on the pressure surface could be the presence of unsteady effects due to stator-rotor interaction in the experiments which are not modeled in the present numerical computations.Copyright © 1996 by ASME

Method for controlling blade tip clearance in a gas turbine

Abstract: A method to compensate for blade tip clearance deterioration between rotating blade tips (82) and a surrounding shroud (72) in an aircraft gas turbine engine (10) includes determining one or more variables based on at least one or more moving averages of one or more engine operating parameters respectively averaged over a fixed number of operational engine flight cycles and adjusting a flow rate of thermal control air (36) to counter the blade tip clearance deterioration based on the one or more variables. The engine operating parameters may include running number of engine cycles, takcoff and cruise exhaust gas temperature margins, a cruise turbine efficiency, takeoff and cruise maximum turbine speeds, a cruise fuel flow. Some or all of the variables may be differences between the moving averages and corresponding baselines of the engine operating parameters respectively or the variables may all be moving averages. The flow rate may be adjusted incrementally.