Assessment of Large-Eddy Simulations to Simulate a High-Speed Low-Pressure Turbine Cascade

The development of compact high-speed low-pressure turbines with high efficiencies requires the characterization of the secondary flow structures and the interaction of cavity purge and leakage flows with the mainstream. During the SPLEEN project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020, the von Karman Institute and Safran Aircraft Engines performed detailed measurements of low-pressure turbines in engine-realistic conditions (i.e., low Reynolds and high exit Mach numbers considering background turbulence, wakes, row interactions, and leakages). The SPLEEN project is thus a fundamental contribution to the progress of high-speed low-pressure turbines by delivering unique experimental databases, essential to characterize the time-resolved 3D turbine flow, and new critical knowledge to mature the design of 3D technological effects. Being able to simulate the flow and associated losses in such a configuration is both challenging and of paramount importance to help the understanding of the flow physics complementing experimental measurements. This paper focuses on the high-fidelity numerical simulation of one of the SPLEEN configuration consisting of a linear blade cascade. The objective is to provide a validated numerical setup in terms of computational domain, boundary conditions, mesh resolution and numerical scheme to reproduce the experimental results. By mean of wall-resolved large-eddy simulations, the design point characterized by an exit Mach number of 0.9 and an exit Reynolds number of 70,000 with a turbulence level of 2.4% is investigated for the baseline configuration without purge and without wake generator. The results show that the considered computational domain and the associated inlet total pressure profile play a critical role on the development of secondary flows. The isentropic Mach number distribution around the blade is shown to be robust to the mesh and numerical scheme. The development of the wake and secondary flow fields are drastically influenced by the mesh resolution and numerical scheme, impacting the resulting losses.