Investigation of Different Turbulence Models Performance on High-turning Turbine Blade Loading Calculations

In this research, the performances of different turbulence models for simulating flow field in turbine stator have been numerically investigated. To this end, incompressible fluid flow around a high-turning stator blade in Reynolds 2.23×105 has been simulated using FLUENT CFD software. Navier-Stokes equation is discretized on a Hybrid computational grid based on the finite volume approach. Considered turbulence models in this research are “Spalart-Allmaras”, “Standard k-ε”, “Realizable k-ε”, “RNG k-ε” , “SST k-ω” and “five-equation Reynolds-Stress Model (RSM)”. The performances of these models are evaluated by comparing the pressure coefficients obtained from numerical simulations with corresponding experimental data at four different stator regions. It has been observed that the ability of a turbulence model to predict flow field is not uniform throughout the stator blade. Moreover, all models show relatively poor performance in flow field regions with intense velocity gradients. Comparing the overall accuracy of different models, SST k-ω and RSM turbulence models show the best agreement with the experimental data.