Application of Endwall Contouring to Transonic Turbine Cascades: Experimental Measurements at Design Conditions

An experimental investigation of the endwall flows in two transonic linear turbine cascades was presented at the 2010 ASME Turbo Expo (GT2010–22760). Endwall contouring was subsequently implemented in these cascades to control the secondary flows, and reduce the total pressure losses. The current paper presents experimental results from these cascades to assess the effectiveness of endwall contouring in the transonic flow regime. The experimental results include blade loadings, total pressure losses, streamwise vorticity and secondary kinetic energy distributions. In addition, surface flow visualization results are presented in order to interpret the endwall limiting streamlines within the blade passages. The flat-endwall and contoured-endwall cascades produce very similar midspan loading distributions and profile losses, but exhibit different secondary flows. The endwall surface flow visualization results indicate weaker interaction between the secondary flows and the blade suction surface boundary layers in the contoured cascades. Overall, the implementation of endwall contouring results in smaller and less intense vortical structures, and the reduction of the associated secondary kinetic energy (SKE) and exit flow angle variations. However, the mass-averaged losses at the main measurement plane, located 40% axial chord lengths downstream of the cascade (1.4C_X), do not corroborate the numerically predicted improvements for the contoured cascades. This is in part attributed to slower mixing rates of the secondary flows in the compressible flow regime. The mass-averaged results at 2.0C_X, on the other hand, show smaller losses for the contoured cascades associated with smaller SKE dissipation downstream of the cascades. Accordingly, the mixed-out row losses also show improvements for the contoured cascades.