Numerical simulation of flow through a gas turbine labyrinth seal

Abstract EN

A computational fluid dynamics code is described and its capability for predicting flow through a gas turbine labyrinth seal is tested and additional results are obtained.

The numerical code uses a calculation procedure that solves the differential equations expressing the physical laws of conservation of mass, momentum and energy by a finite-volume method, and simulates the turbulent stresses through the implementation of the standard k-s turbulence model.

Comparisons with some available experimental and numerical data are made that showed a good agreement of overall performance.

Results are presented and discussed for test cases showing the influence of various individual parameters (pressure ratio, tooth-thickness, clearance, and constant pitch and constant length) on the fluid dynamics of a labyrinth seal.

The numerical results have indicated that the leakage is not significantly affected by tooth thickness, whereas reducing the fin clearance and increasing the number of cavities and the total length of the labyrinth seal decreases the leakage mass flow.