An Aerodynamic Investigation of a High-Pressure Turbine Using Rotor Casing Static Pressure Measurements at Engine Representative Conditions With Different Tip Designs, Tip Gaps, and Inlet Temperature Profiles

Abstract A rotating high-pressure (HP) turbine, in modern aircraft engines, is subjected to high cyclic thermal and mechanical loads. Shroudless turbines experience high heat loads on the rotor tip and casing, which makes them one of the life-limiting components of an engine. If the rotor tip starts to erode, then the tip clearance increases, which increases the over-tip leakage flow, resulting in reduced stage efficiency and ultimately, the engine lifetime. Since the 1970s, extensive research has been undertaken to understand the over-tip leakage flow and develop mitigation strategies such as novel tip designs, to minimize the losses and heat load. However, the majority of the present findings are based on linear cascade or low-speed rotational studies, due to the high cost of the experiments and difficulty in instrumentation at engine conditions. Recent studies (mostly numerical) have shown the importance of testing at engine-representative conditions, specifically targeting the transonic tip flow in a high-speed rotational environment, which is essential for an accurate understanding. The Oxford Turbine Research Facility (OTRF) is a high-speed rotating transient test facility that allows unsteady aerodynamics and heat transfer measurements, at engine representative conditions. This article presents an experimental investigation of the HP turbine rotor casing aerodynamics, performed in the OTRF. Steady and unsteady casing static pressure measurements were acquired, using pneumatic lines and high-frequency response (∼100 kHz) Kulite pressure transducers, respectively. The single-stage HP turbine consisted of cooled vanes (featuring film and trailing-edge slot cooling) and uncooled rotor blades. Three different tip designs (two squealers and one flat) were tested, at two tip gaps, and with two inlet temperature profiles that included a spatially uniform total temperature profile and an engine-representative HP turbine inlet total temperature profile. In parallel, a numerical investigation of the experimental test cases is presented using unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions. The experimental results from this study provide a unique dataset to validate numerical models.