Particle-Vane Interaction Probability in Gas Turbine Engines

Abstract

Engine durability tests are used by manufacturers to demonstrate engine life and minimum performance when subjected to doses of test dusts, often Arizona Road Dust. Grain size distributions are chosen to replicate what enters the engine; less attention is paid to other properties such as composition and shape. We demonstrate here the differences in the probability of interaction of a particle of a given particle Reynolds number on to a vane if particle shape, vane geometry, and flow Reynolds number are varied and discuss why the traditional definition of Stokes number is inadequate for predicting the likelihood of interaction in these flows. We develop a new generalized Stokes number for nozzle guide vanes and demonstrate its use through application to 2D sections of the General Electric E3 nozzle guide vane. The new Stokes number is used to develop a reduced-order probability curve to predict the interaction efficiency of spherical and nonspherical particles, independent of flow conditions and vane geometry. We show that assuming spherical particles instead of more realistic sphericity of 0.75 can lead to as much as 25% difference in the probability of interaction at Stokes numbers of around unity. Finally, we use a hypothetical size distribution to demonstrate the application of the model to predict the total mass fraction of dust interaction with a nozzle guide vane at design point conditions and highlight the potential difference in the accumulation factor between spherical and nonspherical particles.