Numerical investigation of improving turbine sealing effectiveness through slot width modification of the rim seal

The hot gas in the main annulus of a gas turbine can ingest into the rotor-stator cavities through the rim seal clearance as a result of the interaction of the rotor and the stator disks and the external flow in the hot gas annulus. To prevent the turbine root region from being heated up, this ingestion has to be avoided almost completely. This paper introduces a new idea to improve turbine sealing effectiveness through slot width modification of the rim seal. Unsteady numerical simulations are performed with two different rim seal geometries at the design condition with different cooling flow rates. Both of the rim seal geometries are simple axial seal configurations. One is uniform slot rim seal geometry and is taken as the reference case. The other is a new kind of rim seal geometry with slot width modification. The clearance is bigger in the main flow path and smaller in the stator wake region keeping the area of the two kinds of rim seal surfaces equivalent. The sealing air egress happens in the main path flow region and the ingestion happens in the stator wake region. Through comparing the results of the two kinds of rim seal geometries, it is found out that the contoured slot rim seal geometry can reduce the pressure in the cavity which leads to the decrease of the gas turbine loss. The inward radial velocity of the ingestion increases in the stator wake region and hence the axial seal gap has been reduced in this region. The time-averaged outward radial velocity decreases in the main flow region and becomes more uniform. Unsteady flow patterns in the rim seal region are compared for the two seal configurations. The sealing effectiveness is rapidly improved by using the contoured seal configuration. This work provides an idea to increase the sealing effectiveness and decrease the pressure in the cavity.