Analysis of the Aerodynamic Losses in a Supersonic Turbine

The current development of detonation based combustors has triggered the necessity to develop new turbomachinery design procedures to achieve operable and efficient fluid machines. The high-speed flow typically observed at the outlet of a rotating detonation combustors leads to a rather challenging turbine design. The present paper reports the development of a tailored methodology to predict the non-isentropic operation of turbines exposed to supersonic inlet conditions. This one-dimensional design procedure starts by identifying the operable design space, and uses empirical loss models to estimate the main sources of inviscid and viscous losses. The turbine performance is analyzed for different design choices and compared with three dimensional computational fluid dynamic results.