A Turbine Cascade Facility for Secondary Flow Research

This paper outlines some recent major changes to the so-called Durham Cascade that will be of interest to other experimenters working on low speed linear cascades. The Durham Cascade is a popular CFD test case and has also been used extensively for profiled endwall research (Hartland et al. [1]) and more recently for the study of reverse compound lean (Bagshaw et al. [2]). The cascade has recently undergone a complete rebuild, which enables it to provide experimental results of lasting significance for a number of years to come. The improvements described in this paper include, good quality symmetrical inlet flow, a new three-dimensional traverse system and an improved blade cartridge system allowing arbitrary three-dimensional geometries to be tested.