Study on aerodynamic optimal super/transonic turbine cascade and its geometry characteristics

The shock waves are important phenomena in transonic turbines, which cause lots of negative effects on the aerodynamic performance. Much of attention had been paid on reducing the strength of the shock waves via modifying turbine cascade geometry, and it is highly preferred to build experiences on the relationship between the cascade aerodynamic performance and the geometric parameters. The paper presents a numerical study on the aerodynamic optimal transonic turbine cascade and its geometry characteristics. Three typical Russia transonic turbine cascades with different design conditions are selected and optimized using adjoint method at three different back pressures, respectively. Thus, the best geometry parameters for optimum aerodynamic performance can be found. Then the key geometry parameters of optimized cascades are extracted and compared with the original ones. Results show that even the best designs by hands could be less efficient than ones by computer-aided optimizations. Some experiences on how to set the key geometry parameters for a best performance are obtained. The reduced shock profiling is applied to the thermal turbomachinery and machine dynamics transonic turbine by using the adjoint method. The performance of the thermal turbomachinery and machine dynamics transonic turbine was increased significantly.