Nonuniform Clearance Effects on Windage Heating and Swirl Development in Straight-Through Labyrinth Seals
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 35, Issue 3
Abstract
Straight-through labyrinth seals are reliable noncontact seal structures widely used in aeroengines. Windage heating and swirl development of labyrinth seals are of great significance to the design of secondary air systems. In the operation process of an aeroengine, a labyrinth seal is supposed to experience uneven temperature distribution, which may cause deformation and resulting nonuniformity along the flow direction. The nonuniformity coefficient was defined to characterize the degree of nonuniformity so that the influence of nonuniform clearance on windage heating and swirl development can be analyzed quantitatively. Windage heating and swirl development were analyzed from the perspectives of different Reynolds numbers, pressure ratios, circumferential Mach numbers, and dimensionless minimum tip clearances. Simulation results showed that when other dimensionless parameters are the same, both windage heating number and exit swirl ratio decrease with the increase of the nonuniformity degree. With the same nonuniform degree, the decrease rate of divergent clearance is larger than that of convergent clearance. The changing trends of the decrease rate of both windage heating number and exit swirl ratio were analyzed in detail. It can be concluded that the decrease rate of the exit swirl ratio reaches the peak when the dimensionless minimum tip clearance is about 0.067. This result makes it clear that the effect of nonuniform clearance is indispensable for the safety assessment of aeroengines.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the two corresponding authors by request.
Acknowledgments
This study is funded by Project MJ-2018-D-21 supported by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China. This study also is funded by a major project of the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61890923).
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 35 • Issue 3 • May 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 13, 2021
Accepted: Jan 10, 2022
Published online: Feb 22, 2022
Published in print: May 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Jul 22, 2022
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