The Effect of Wake Passing on a Flow Separation in a Low-Pressure Turbine Cascade

This paper describes an investigation into the effect that passing wakes have on a separation bubble that exists on the pressure surface and near the leading edge of a low-pressure turbine blade. Previous experimental studies have shown that the behavior of this separation is strongly incidence dependent and that it responds to its disturbance environment. The results presented in this paper examine the effect of wake passing in greater detail. Two-dimensional, Reynolds averaged, numerical predictions are first used to examine qualitatively the unsteady interaction between the wakes and the separation bubble. The separation is predicted to consist of spanwise vortices whose development is in phase with the wake passing. However, comparison with experiments shows that the numerical predictions exaggerate the coherence of these vortices and also overpredict the time-averaged length of the separation. Nonetheless, experiments strongly suggest that the predicted phase locking of the vortices in the separation onto the wake passing is physical.