AEROACOUSTIC CFD ANALYSIS OF TURBINE FOR BLADE AGING/DAMAGE Abstract Unsteady flow is modeled in single and multi-stages of an axial

turbine to analyze the rotor blade surface variation vis--vis aero acoustics. The initial part of the study focuses on 2-dimensional single/multistage analyses, whereas in the later part a 3-dimensional analysis is done for a single stage of the turbine. The in-house CFD solver FLUENT is used to study the effects of varying the surface roughness and geometric damage on the acoustics. The acoustics module of the solver based on the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkins Acoustic Analogy is used in this regard. Sound pressure level and surface unsteady pressure plots and the directivity charts for the sensors are utilized to analyze the changes in acoustics with the blade surface and geometry variation. Objective The project aims at studying the correlation between the turbine output noise and the blade surface roughness and geometric damage Methodology y y y y Geometry Modeling Pre-processing in fluent FFT Post-processing Spectral Analysis at the receivers

Student: Plt Off Abdul Samad Advisor: Wg Cdr Rizwan Riaz Conclusion The sound pressure level was found to decrease with increase in surface roughness and geometric damage. However besides the damage size the SPL also depends upon the type and location of the damage. The deviations in the general trend were mainly due to wave interference, minimum grid cell size of the domain and approximations in F W-H acoustic analogy. The technique can be employed effectively to locate blade damage without physically dismounting the engine by using high fidelity microphones as receivers. Figure-1: SPL verses frequency plot for varying roughness heights for 1-stage turbine case

y Comparison of results Analysis The 2-d single and multi-stage turbine geometries were modeled in Gambit and imported to Fluent for flow analysis. Acoustic analysis was carried out using Ffowc Williams Hawkings sound analogy. After FFT postprocessing a suitable receiver out of seven modeled receivers was selected for further analysis. Sound pressure levels were computed for the cases with simple and rough surface geometries and the values at BPF were compared to obtain the variation in Sound Pressure Level (SPL) with roughness change. The initial trend for 1-stage case was a decrease in sound pressure level with increase in roughness height. However with increase in number of stages, few deviations were found. To identify the reason for these deviations a more detailed analysis was carried out individually for each blade of the multi-stage cases. The same detailed type of analysis was done for each blade of two different damaged geometry models again for single and multistages. Besides the wave interference phenomenon, the blade surface pressure variations with time were studied to identify the real source of variations in results. Similarly full scale 3-D geometry was modeled to study the surface roughness variations.