This paper presents a comprehensive validation and verification study of turbomachinery Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow solvers on the transonic axial compressor TUDa-GLR-OpenStage. Two commercial solvers namely Ansys CFX and Numeca FineTurbo are adopted to provide the benchmark solutions, which can be used for verification of other RANS solvers in the future. Based on these solvers, five sets of grids, two advection schemes (i.e., central difference and second-order upwind), four turbulence models (i.e., SA, SA-RC, SST and EARSM) and two rotor-stator interface models (i.e., mixing plane and sliding plane) are investigated to quantify their effects on predicting the performance and the flow field of the compressor stage. Results show that the choices of grid density and turbulence model are most sensitive to the prediction, leading to 5% and 7% variation in compressor performance characteristics, respectively. Regarding the choice of grid density, a method to estimate the grid discretization error is demonstrated, which is transferrable to other cases. Regarding the choice of turbulence model, the EARSM model is found overall most accurate among the investigated models, and the limitations and deficiencies of the rest models are discussed in detail based on the analysis of the mean flow fields and the eddy viscosity fields. The grids and the major CFD results presented in this work are open-accessed to the community for further research. The results and discussions presented in this paper provide a useful reference for future practices of RANS simulations for compressors.

The cavity flow of shrouded stators is quite complex and not yet completely understood, especially for its loss characteristics. In this paper, a matrix of numerical simulations was designed and conducted to investigate the loss characteristics of the cavity flow in a compressor cascade, with a wide range of incidence, two flow coefficients, and three seal clearances. The effect of the skewed boundary layer was introduced to simulate the practical compressor environment as far as possible. The results show that the total pressure loss coefficient is unable of evaluating the cavity leakage loss correctly since it ignores the temperature rise. With the reduction of the flow coefficient, the entropy loss coefficient and thermal entropy generation rate trend to increase, while the change of the viscous entropy generation rate is dependent on the incidence since the high tangential velocity deteriorates the flow of the pressure side at large negative incidence but significantly improves the flow of the suction side as the incidence increases. In addition, there is a significant difference in loss sensitivity to the seal clearance at various incidences. One of the major reasons is the change of pressure difference between the downstream and upstream. And the other major reason is the distribution difference of the high-loss fluid caused by the variation in the passage vortex. These key findings are able to provide insights leading to reducing the compressor loss due to the cavity leakage flow

The hub and casing walls of axial compressors are often modeled as smooth continuous surfaces in CFD simulations, but in real geometries, non-smooth pinches, steps and leakage cavities may exist. In the GPPS first Turbomachinery CFD Workshop, a comprehensive validation and verification campaign of RANS flow solvers was conducted, and all the simulation results consistently over-predicted the total pressure ratio at the rotor exit near the casing and the stator exit near the hub. From a recent examination of the test rig geometry, a pinched casing wall over the rotor and a leakage cavity below the stator were found, which were not considered in the workshop. In this paper, the effects of these endwall geometric uncertainties and errors are analyzed via numerical simulation. When considering the rotor casing pinch of the test geometry, the predicted total pressure ratio and choke mass flow of the compressor stage are smaller than that without the pinch, which shows better agreement with the measured data. When considering a stator hub cavity with a leakage flow rate about 0.2% of the compressor inlet mass flow, the near-hub total pressure ratio distribution matches better with the experimental data, but the effects on the global compressor stage characteristics are not visible. The relevant mechanisms of these changes in performances are analyzed in detail. The updated geometries and grids will be released to the public as a benchmark test case for turbomachinery CFD.

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