Flow Instabilities in Gas Turbine Chute Seals

The ingress of hot annulus gas into stator–rotor cavities is an important topic to engine designers. Rim-seals reduce the pressurized purge required to protect highly stressed components. This paper describes an experimental and computational study of flow through a turbine chute seal. The computations—which include a 360 deg domain—were undertaken using dlrtrace's time-marching solver. The experiments used a low Reynolds number turbine rig operating with an engine-representative flow structure. The simulations provide an excellent prediction of cavity pressure and swirl, and good overall agreement of sealing effectiveness when compared to experiment. Computation of flow within the chute seal showed strong shear gradients which influence the pressure distribution and secondary-flow field near the blade leading edge. High levels of shear across the rim-seal promote the formation of large-scale structures at the wheel-space periphery; the number and speed of which were measured experimentally and captured, qualitatively and quantitatively, by computations. A comparison of computational domains ranging from 30 deg to 360 deg indicates that steady features of the flow are largely unaffected by sector size. However, differences in large-scale flow structures were pronounced with a 60 deg sector and suggest that modeling an even number of blades in small sector simulations should be avoided.