Improving the performance of turbine based on a new optimization design method

In order to improve the ability of non-axisymmetric end wall reducing the second flow, and further improve the performance of turbines, a novel optimization design method of non-axisymmetric end wall contouring was developed, which was also adopted for a high pressure (HP) turbine stator row. End wall parametrization and 3D Navier-Stokes (N-S) flow solver and genetic algorithms (GA) based on artificial neural network (ANN) were carried out to the non-axisymmetric end wall optimization. The effects of optimized non-axisymmetric end wall on the flow field of the HP turbine stator were analyzed. The results indicate that the optimized non-axisymmetric end wall can effectively improve the flow structures in the HP turbine stator, hence the formation of the passage vortex is delayed and the intensity of the corner vortex is decreased. Furthermore, the flow loss is reduced. And the total pressure loss coefficient at the stator exit reduces by 3.724%. In addition, the non-axisymmetric end wall contouring on hub has few influences on the flow field upper half of the blade.