Design of an Experimental Facility for Investi- gating the Flow in a Low Pressure Turbine Exit Structure

Licentiate thesis, 2015

This report presents the design of a turbine facility for investigating the flow in the EES located at Chalmers University of Technology. The EES is the structure located downstream of the LPT in a jet engine. In this rig, 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 were used to compute pressure losses. CFD tools have been used in the design of the facility. A short description of FEA performed in the LPT rotor and structure is included.