Unsteady flows of a highly loaded turbine blade with flat endwall and contoured endwall

Abstract Strong secondary flow results in substantial aerodynamic loss for highly-loaded turbine. Accurate prediction of the complicated flow structures proposes challenges to the widely used Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach. This work employs the hybrid RANS/Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method to study the unsteady flows for a highly-loaded turbine blade, with both flat endwall and optimized contoured endwall. Evolution of the unsteady flows in the endwall region is analyzed, with emphasis on the loss generation mechanism. Results show that for the flat endwall, the horseshoe vortex system is highly unsteady and is a significant source of unsteadiness in both the passage and the wake region. It contributes to the unsteady passage vortex, also the earlier breakdown of the trailing edge shedding vortex. The Probability Density Function (PDF) histogram of velocity in the wake region is bimodal, implying the perturbations from two mechanisms. For the contoured endwall, the unsteady evolution of the horseshoe vortex is blocked, which results in significantly reduced unsteadiness, also the merge between the horseshoe vortex with the passage vortex is prevented. Effect of the flow unsteadiness on the loss generation is assessed based on the entropy generation rates contributed by the time-averaged flow and the fluctuations. The effect of unsteadiness is two-fold: unsteady perturbations trigger the vortex breakdown into small-scale structures and thus weakened wake velocity deficit and loss generation; however, in both the passage and the wake region the entropy generation by the fluctuations are remarkable. For the contoured endwall, due to the reduced flow unsteadiness, loss generation contributed by the fluctuations are much smaller compared to the flat endwall. The results highlight the importance of including the loss generation by the fluctuations, also a possible mechanism to reduce the secondary loss by attenuating the flow unsteadiness with the contoured endwall.