摘要
Due to a large gradient of reaction, LP rotor blades remain underloaded at the root over some range of volumetric flow rates. An interesting design to control the flow through the root passage of the overloaded stator and underloaded moving blade row is compound lean at the root of stator blades. The paper describes results of numerical investigations from a 3D NS solver FlowER conducted for several configurations of stator blade compound lean. The computations are carried out for a wide range of volumetric flow rates, accounting for the nominal operating regime as well as low and high load. It is found that compound lean induces additional blade force, streamwise curvature and redistribution of flow parameters in the stage, including pressure and mass flow rate spanwise that can improve the flow conditions in both the stator and the rotor. The obtained efficiency improvements depend greatly on the flow regime, with the highest gains in the region of low load.
