In this paper, a computational study was conducted in order to investigate the rotor blade sweep effect on the aerodynamics of a small axial supersonic impulse turbine stage. For this purpose, three-dimensional unsteady RANS simulations have been performed with three different rotor blade sweep angles (-15°, 0°, +15°) and the results were compared with each other. Both NTG (No tip gap) and WTG (With tip gap) models were applied to examine the effect on tip leakage flow. As a result of the simulation, the positive sweep model (+15°) showed better performance in relative flow angle, Mach number distribution, entropy rise, and tip leakage mass flow rate compared with no sweep model. With the blade static pressure distribution result, the positive sweep model showed that hub and tip loading was increased and midspan loading was reduced compared with no sweep model while the negative sweep model (-15°) showed the opposite result. The positive sweep model also showed a good aerodynamic performance around the hub region compared with other models. Overall, the positive sweep angle enhanced the turbine efficiency.

In this study, 3-dimensional URANS simulation was performed to analyze the effect of the nozzle-rotor axial gap spacing of a supersonic impulse turbine on turbine performance. The computations were conducted for four different axial gap cases corresponding to about 6%, 10%, 20% and 30% of the blade height, respectively. The results show a good agreement with previous studies and the turbine efficiency decreases drastically in certain range. It is examined that the turbine performance characteristics could change depending on the influence of leading edge shock to the nozzle outlet. It is also found that the entropy rise distributions along the span differ from each other.