High-pressure turbine rim seal design for increased efficiency

In high-pressure turbines, compressor air is used to purge the disc space in an effort to protect the blade roots and the turbine disc from overheating and failure. The purge air exits the disc space through a rim seal at the hub of the main annulus and is subsequently entrained in the rotor hub endwall flows. The introduction of the purge air into the turbine main stream causes additional losses and therefore reduced turbine efficiency. For a given rim sealing mass flow rate, the rim seal geometry has to be designed in a way that reduces the detrimental impact of the sealing flow on turbine performance. In this study, the rim seal of a generic high-pressure turbine, representative of modern large civil aero-engines, is redesigned under consideration of the pressure field upstream of the rotor. Unsteady numerical simulations of the turbine stage are used to compare the aerodynamic impact of three different rim seal designs. The numerical simulations predict an increase in the time-averaged turbine stage efficiency of over 0.2% for the stage configuration with the final redesigned rim seal compared to the configuration with the original baseline rim seal geometry at the nominal sealing mass flow rate