Numerical Simulation of Real-Gas Flow in a Supersonic Turbine Nozzle Ring

Abstract

In small Rankine cycle power plants, it is advantageous to use organic media as the working fluid. A low-cost single-stage turbine design together with the high molecular weight of the fluid leads to high Mach numbers in the turbine. Turbine efficiency can be improved significantly by using an iterative design procedure based on an accurate CFD simulation of the flow. For this purpose, an existing Navier-Stokes solver is tailored for real gas, because the expansion of an organic fluid cannot be described with ideal gas equations. The proposed simulation method is applied for the calculation of supersonic flow in a turbine stator. The main contribution of the paper is to demonstrate how a typical ideal-gas CFD code can be adapted for real gases in a very general, fast, and robust manner.