Effects of Different Turbulence Models in Simulation of Unsteady Tip Leakage Flow in Axial Compressor Rotor Blades Row

Characteristics of rotor blade tip clearance flow in axial compressors can significantly affect their performance and stable operation. It may also increase blade vibrations and cause detrimental noises. Therefore, this paper is contributed to investigate tip leakage flow in a low speed isolated axial compressor rotor blades row. Simulations are carried out on near-stall condition, which is valuable of being studied in detail. In turbomachines, flows are non-isotropic and highly three-dimensional. The reason arises from the complicated structure of bounded walls, tip leakage flows, secondary flows, swirl effects, streamlines curvatures and pressure gradients along different directions. As a result, accurate studies on tip leakage flow would be accompanied by many challenges such as adopting suitable turbulence models. So, investigations are carried out numerically utilizing two well-known turbulence models of k-ε and k-ω-SST, separately. It is shown that the k-ε model yields poor results in comparison to the k-ω-SST model. To realize reasons for this discrepancy, turbulence parameters such as turbulent kinetic energy, dissipation and eddy viscosity terms at the tip clearance region were surveyed in detail. It is found out that estimation for eddy viscosity term is too high in the k-ε model due to excessive growth of turbulent kinetic energy, time scale, and lack of effective damping coefficient. This leads to dissipation of vortical structure of flow and wrong estimation of flow field at the rotor tip clearance region. Nevertheless, k-ω-SST turbulence model provides results consistent with reality.