Investigations on the Aerodynamic Characteristics and Blade Excitations of the Radial Turbine with Pulsating Inlet Flow

Abstract The aerodynamic performance, detailed unsteady flow and time-based excitations acting on blade surfaces of a radial flow turbine have been investigated with pulsation flow condition. The results show that the turbine instantaneous performance under pulsation flow condition deviates from the quasi-steady value significantly and forms obvious hysteretic loops around the quasi-steady conditions. The detailed analysis of unsteady flow shows that the characteristic of pulsation flow field in radial turbine is highly influenced by the pulsation inlet condition. The blade torque, power and loading fluctuate with the inlet pulsation wave in a pulse period. For the blade excitations, the maximum and the minimum blade excitations conform to the wave crest and wave trough of the inlet pulsation, respectively, in time-based scale. And toward blade chord direction, the maximum loading distributes along the blade leading edge until 20% chord position and decreases from the leading to trailing edge.