THEORETICAL MODELLING OF THE TURBULENT FLOW IN A ROTOR-STATOR CAVITY SUBJECTED TO A SUPERIMPOSED CENTRIPETAL FLOW

This study focuses on the turbulent flow in a rotor-stator cavity subjected to a centripetal radial inflow. The aspect ratio of the cavity and the Ekman num-ber being small compared to unity, the boundary layers are separated by a central core region. Usu-ally, the turbulence is neglected outside the bound-ary layers. The originality of the present paper is that turbulence is considered in the central core, which provides a simple solution for the radial dis-tribution of the central core ratio K. It is found that K varies according to a power law of the dimen-sionless radius. The theoretical results are in very good agreement with numerical simulations per-formed with the Fluent code using the RSM turbulence model, as well as experiments from the literature