Master Thesis

HS 2015

Steam droplet and film formation modeling of

steam turbine in LECs MULTI3 CFD Code

Steam turbines are one of the primary sources of power generation globally. For a
high efficiency steam turbine design, low-pressure (LP) last-stage is of primary
interest, as largest portion of power is generated in this stage. Flow is supersonic
with complex bow and oblique shock interaction between nozzle and bucket. Steam
expansion results in non-equilibrium condensation at sub-cooling below saturation
temperatures. The non-equilibrium phase change generates thermodynamic
irreversible losses, approximately 1% drop in efficiency, for every additional percent
of wetness added. Bucket blades at a very high rotational speed hit and break the
liquid film formed in the last-stage nozzle, resulting in blade erosion and a reduced
lifetime of turbine.
The purpose of this project is to implement
an accurate and computationally fast model
for droplet and film formation into LECs in-
house RANS solver MULTI3. A wet-steam
model is recently implemented and used for
the assessment of unsteady loads and shock
structure interaction with the LP turbine
blades. MULTI3 has been developed to
run on modern Multi-GPU supercomputing
architectures with extreme computational
power, which gives a major advantage in
terms of speed over the commercial CFD
codes.

MULTI3 CFD for LP steam turbine

The project tasks include.
1. Implementation of Multi-GPU parallelized liquid-fraction conservation.
2. Droplet and liquid film formation modeling based on nucleation theory.
3. Film breakup modeling.
4. Non-equilibrium phase change momentum-energy balance source terms.
5. Test case validation with experiments.
This project requires good programming skills in Fortran, basic understanding of
CFD, parallel computing with a 70% effort in development and 30% in code
validation and performance analyses.
Contact: Asad Raheem, Institut fr Energietechnik, LEC, ETH Zrich, ML H 39,
Sonneggstrasse 3, CH-8092 Zrich, T: +41 44 632 45 51, email: asad@lec.mavt.ethz.ch