Predicting Efficiency of a Turbine Driven by Pulsing Flow

Abstract

One of the challenges of integrating pressure gain combustion into a gas turbine engine is that a turbine driven by pulsing flow experiences a decrease in efficiency. Computational fluid dynamic simulations validated with experiments showed that pulse amplitude is the driving factor for decreased turbine efficiency and not the pulsing frequency. A quadratic correlation between turbine efficiency and corrected pulse amplitude is presented. Incidence variation is shown to cause the change in turbine efficiency and a correlation between corrected incidence and corrected amplitude is shown to predict turbine efficiency.