Experimental investigations on flow and heat transfer characteristics in a high-speed rotor–stator disk cavity with axial throughflow

The rotor–stator disk cavity system is of great importance for turbine blade cooling and preventing gas invasion in the aircraft engine. This study presents an experimental investigation on a high-speed rotor–stator disk cavity with axial throughflow. The aims are to experimentally measure and reveal the pressure characteristics, windage heating, swirl characteristics, and relative temperatures at a high rotational speed of 0–9000 rpm with mass flow rates of 0.05–0.15 kg/s. Especially, a new measurement idea was proposed and tested that relative temperature in the rotor system can be obtained by measuring absolute parameters in the stator system. Experiment results reveal that rotational speed and inlet mass flow are the main parameters to determine flow characteristics in the rotor–stator cavity. The increase of rotational speed will enhance the effect of centrifugal boosting, windage heating, and swirl characteristics. But increasing inlet mass flow rate will lead to the opposite effect. When the airflow is in the heat balance state, relative total temperature and adiabatic temperature can be acquired by measuring absolute temperature and swirl ratio at the same radius. The maximum deviation is below 2 K. The results can be beneficial to the optimization design of rotor–stator disk cavity in the gas turbine engines.