SYMKOM 2011 No.

2011

Piotr KLONOWICZ piotr.klonowicz@p.lodz.pl Krzysztof SOBCZAK krzysztof.sobczak@p.lodz.pl Tomasz FIJAKOWSKI tomasz.fijalkowski@p.lodz.pl Institute of Turbomachinery Technical University of Lodz, Poland

ANALYSIS OF KINEMATICS FOR A SINGLE-STAGE ORC IMPULSE TURBINE

Abstract: The paper describes an analysis of an influence of the stator outflow angle 1 on the performance of a single stage turbine. The turbine is impulse and supersonic with an average Mach number at the stator outflow of 1.8 at the design point. The study includes a 1D design of the stage as well as a CFD analysis of the flow which is considered compressible, viscous and turbulent. Key words: ORC, turbine, CFD

1. INTRODUCTION Power plants based on the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) have been increasingly employed over the last 20 years to produce power from various, low temperature heat source. The ORC technology is applicable to recovery heat from gas turbines, waste energy from industrial or chemical processes, geothermal energy, biomass and solar thermal energy. The use of ORC technology based systems has matured to a field proven and highly reliable technology [3]. The turbine described in this paper is designed to work in the experimental ORC micro-power plant of the hybrid type, which is being built at the Institute of Turbomachinery, TUL. In this type of the thermal cycle, two different working media are used. The first one is water, the second is a low-boiling point medium HFE 7100. Main elements of the upper, high-temperature cycle are: a steam boiler, a steam turbine with a condenser and a water tank with a recirculation pump. The bottom, low-temperature cycle consists of: an evaporator, an ORC turbine, an ORC condenser and a reservoir of the HFE 7100 medium with a recirculation

Piotr Klonowicz, Krzysztof Sobczak, Tomasz Fijakowski

pump, as well as a pump for the water cooling of ORC condenser [2]. The concept of the experimental stand is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig.1 : Concept of the experimental test stand

For the upper steam cycle, the Curtis stage was designed. For the bottom ORC cycle a single stage impulse turbine was designed. In this stage, the outflow from the stator is supersonic and the inflow to the rotor is transonic. The expansion in the ORC turbine on enthalpy entropy graph is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2: H-s plot for the ORC turbine

Choosing the flow kinematics was one of the key points of the design phase. The turbine efficiency was chosen as a criterion. The first step to calculate efficiency is estimation of losses. However, in this case, the traditional

Analysis of Kinematics for Single-Stage ORC Impulse Turbine

empirical formulas, which are successful in the case of typical steam turbines, for this ORC turbine give significantly different results [6]. That is the reason way the effort was made to compute the turbine for different kinematics of the flow (different angles of the stator outflow) by means of CFD and to confront the results with the data from the empirical relations. 2. ONE-DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS The performance of the turbine was computed by means of a onedimensional method. The parameters at the inlet and the outlet of the turbine were set according to the above presented power plant cycle. They were gathered in Table 1.
Table 1. ORC turbine operation parameters

Mass flow rate Inlet total pressure Inlet temperature Outlet static pressure

0.58 kg/s 2.42 bar(a) 90C 0.34 bar(a)

The design assumption was that the machine would work with ball bearings and thus, low rotational speed was needed (3500 rpm). Due to a low mass flow rate, in order to maintain reasonable blade heights, partial admission at the turbine inlet had to be applied. Its value was set to = 1/3. The mean diameter was also fixed and equal to D1 = 414 mm. The hub and shroud surfaces were cylindrical (no divergence in the meridional channel). A performance comparison of stages with different values of 1 required a general loss model. The one applied in the 1D study was taken from [4]. It describes the total pressure losses in the blade channels. Because the blade heights and angles differed for different 1 angles, the losses of partial admission in every case were not the same. They were estimated by means of the relations given in [10]. Other types of losses like friction, losses in sealing, etc., were not computed. They were assumed to be the same for all of the cases so they were not required to obtain a qualitative comparison. 3. BLADES GEOMETRY The comfortable approach to obtain the blades geometry is to pick the profiles from the profile atlas, e.g. [5]. Their number and position are determined from the description given in the atlas. Every profile can work effectively in a certain range of flow angles but the problem is that it works optimally for specific values. Another difficulty is connected with the supersonic flow in the stator (nozzle). In order to work properly, a supercritical nozzle has to have proper dimension of the critical and outlet sections. The nozzle profiles given in the atlas [5] were designed to work with steam and their geometries are not suitable for organic fluids due to large differences of the equations of state [9, page 7].

Piotr Klonowicz, Krzysztof Sobczak, Tomasz Fijakowski

Fig. 3: Turbine blades a general view

Thus, the idea was to parameterize the geometry of the profiles and the shape them according to the kinematics of the flow. The first attempt was to use the commercial software ANSYS Blade Modeler but the practice revealed that it was not suitable both for supersonic nozzles and impulse profiles. Therefore, a special parametric geometry model had to be developed. As suggested in [12], it is very beneficial to use Bezier curves for the geometry description. This approach was customized and applied for the turbine profiles [8]. An example of the turbine configuration obtained by means of this approach is presented in Fig. 3. 4. NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS Computational meshes for the stator and the rotor were generated by means of the ANSYS TurgoGrid software, which is capable of easy generation of high quality hexahedral meshes for blade passages in turbomachinery. Despite some minor problems with the predefined topology alternation in the throat of the nozzle as far as the solver requirements are concerned, good qualities of meshes were obtained in all cases (orthogonality angles > 25, aspect ratio < 400). A mesh independence study was preformed for one of the considered geometries. Four mesh sizes ranging from 0.1 1.0 per each (the stator and the rotor) passage were evaluated. Some exemplary results of the global flow parameters are presented in Fig. 4. Because only minor (< 0.2%) alternations of the parameter values between meshes composed of 0.5 million nodes and the most refined one were observed, this mesh size was used in further studies.

Analysis of Kinematics for Single-Stage ORC Impulse Turbine

Fig. 4. Mesh independence test a relative difference of the mass flow rate (left) and a pressure difference between the inlet and the outlet of the stator (right)

Due to high flow velocities, especially in the throat of the nozzle, the maximal value of the y+ parameter of the first mesh layer from the wall was equal to 110 and its averaged value was below 40. Thus, the mesh refinement in the boundary regions was not sufficient to fully solve the boundary layer and the wall function was used. In this case, the number of the mesh elements in the boundary (at least 8) recommended by the software developer [1] was applied. This approach seems satisfactory because no wall separation was observed for geometries under investigation. The ANSYS CFX code was used in the simulations [1]. The second order space discretization was employed. Threedimensional, compressible flows of the ORC medium (treated as a real gas) in single passages of turbine wheels were considered. Fluid properties were determined on the basis of the EES software [7] and implemented in the computational procedure by means of the property table. Due to limitations of the computers available, steady state simulations were conducted with Stage (circumferential averaging) interfaces between the stationary and rotational wheels. Despite its limitation, this approach is widely applied in numerical simulations of turbomachinery [11]. The Shear Stress Transport turbulence model was applied with an automatic wall function. The total pressure equal to 242.638 kPa as well as the total temperature of 90C and the medium turbulence intensity (Tu = 5%) were imposed as the boundary conditions at the turbine inlet. The averaged static pressure equal to 34.15 kPa was applied at the outlet. Channel walls were smooth and adiabatic. The rotational speed of the turbine rotor is equal to 3500 rpm. An adequate level of convergence was obtained in all the cases under analysis. In the majority of cases, Root Mean Square (RMS) residuals did not exceed 1.0e-4. Mass, momentum and energy flows were properly balanced in the computational domain (well below 0.01% of the mean flows).

6 5. RESULTS

Piotr Klonowicz, Krzysztof Sobczak, Tomasz Fijakowski

The results of both the 1D analysis as well as the CFD study were shown in Fig. 5. The presented curves differ significantly and the average difference is about 0.5 kW. However, the character of both plots is very similar. They have clear maxima which occur at about 11 in case of the 1D model and at about 10 for the CFD model. It is important to notice that on the left side of the maxima, the power starts to drop dramatically. That is why applying so small angles can be responsible for poor performance in the off-design region where the parameters are higher than nominal. There are probably a few sources of the difference between the results. One of them arises from the fact that the loss model used in the 1D analysis is very general and purely empirical. What is more it was created on the basis of the steam or the air flow which, as said before, behave differently in comparison to organic fluids. Another source may come from the CFD model which is also somewhat simplified. The last factor that can be responsible for such a big quantitative difference comes from the applied geometry generation. For every value of 1 angle, the individual profile shapes were created which strictly fit the given kinematics. The comparison presented above does not take into consideration the partial admission loss. The value of this loss itself is presented in Fig. 6. It is clear that for small angles, the loss is growing rapidly so it is even worse to use small angles in case of partial admission. Figure 7. shows a comparison of the Mach number distribution on the blade-to-blade surface in the middle of the flow channel. The presented results include the cases where 1 angle was equal to 8.3, 10.2, 14.0 and 18.6. Due to the high Mach number in the nozzle channels, clear shockwaves occur, which have significant influence on the efficiency and may induce further optimization.

Fig. 5. Turbine internal power vs. nozzle outflow angle - 1D and CFD models (without the partial admission loss).

Fig. 6. Partial admission loss vs. a nozzle outflow angle

Analysis of Kinematics for Single-Stage ORC Impulse Turbine

Fig. 7. Distribution of the Mach number on the blade-to-blade surface in the middle of the flow channel for different 1 angles, a) 18.6, b) 14.0, c) 10.2, d) 8.3.

6. CONCLUSIONS Choosing the proper kinematics of an ORC turbine is an important and difficult task. The first difficulty comes from the loss estimation which should employ a reliable loss model. Another factor is connected with the turbine destination. Turbines operating in cycles with more stable parameters like in biomass, geothermal and waste heat power plants can have a smaller 1 in order to gain an efficiency benefit. However, values below 12 are risky and not recommended. Even if the parameters of the given heat source are stable, the parameters of the cooling medium may be not. In case of the cycles where parameters can change even in a wider range (for example, in solar thermal power plants) bigger angles should be considered.

Piotr Klonowicz, Krzysztof Sobczak, Tomasz Fijakowski

REFERENCES [1] [2] ANSYS CFX, Release 12.1, 2009. Antczak, ., Fijakowski, T., Klonowicz, P., 2010, Design of low-power turbines for the experimental micro-power plant of the hybrid type, 9th Conference on Power System Engineering, Thermodynamics & Fluid Flow ES 2010 June 17 - 18, 2010, Pilsen, Czech Republic. Bronicki, L..Y., 2007, Organic Rankine Cycle power plant for waste heat recovery, Nevada, 2007. Chodkiewicz, R., 2008, wiczenia projektowe z turbin Wydawnictwo Naukowo-Techniczne, Warszawa. (in Polish) cieplnych.

[3] [4] [5] [6]

Dejcz M.E., Filipov G. A., Lazariew L.J., 1965 Atlas profiliej rieszetok osiewych turbin, Moskwa, Maszinostrojenie 1965 Hanausek, P., 2010, Initial design of the turbine for the ORC, Unpublished report. Institute of Turbomachinery, TUL. Lodz, April 2010. (in Polish)

[7] http://www.fchart.com/ [8] Klonowicz P., Hanausek P., 2011, Optimum Design of the Axial ORC st Turbines with Support of the Ansys CFX Flow, 1 International Seminar on ORC Power Systems ORC 2011, Delft, Septemper 22-23, 2011. [9] Pasquale, D., Ghidoni, A., Rebay, S., 2011, Shape Optimization of an ORC st Radial Turbine Nozzle, 1 International Seminar on ORC Power Systems ORC 2011, Delft, Septemper 22-23, 2011. [10] Perycz, S., 1992, Turbiny parowe i gazowe, Polska Akademia Nauk, Instytut Maszyn Przepywowych, Wrocaw. [11] Rosic, B., Denton, J.D., 2008, Control of Shroud Leakage Loss by Reducing Circumferential Mixing, Journal of Turbomachinery, Vol. 130, pp. 1-7. [12] Thvenin, D., Janiga, G., 2008, Optimization and Computational Fluid Dynamics, Springer, 2008.

Artyku ukaza si w zeszytach naukowych P - Cieplne Maszyny przepywowe, d, 2011.