Vol. 52 No. 1 (2015)   New Products & Technologies
Technical Papers

Computational Fluid Dynamics Technology Applied to High Performance, Reliable Axial Compressors for Power Generation Gas Turbines

RYOSUKE MITO
XUELIN GAO
THOMAS WALKER
YASURO SAKAMOTO
HIROYUKI HAMANA

When developing high-performance, reliable gas turbine compressors, repeated cycles of experimentation, verification, and analysis are used to eventually determine the optimum design. Currently, thanks to advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology, full-stage analysis results can be obtained within a practical amount of time. This allows for the loading distribution and internal flow phenomena for all stages to be computed accurately and understood in a quantitative fashion during the design phase. This is not only for the rated load condition, but also for the partial load condition meaning that using these results as part of the design improvement process can reduce the required experimental verification cases. Given that the role of CFD analysis is expanding, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) has made efforts to improve the analysis accuracy. This paper discusses recent improvements in CFD methods and illustrates some applications for the improved technology.