The Influence of Mesh Resolution on 3D RANS Flow Simulations in Turbomachinery Flow Parts

Abstract

The question of the difference mesh refinement degree influence on the results of calculation of the three-dimensional viscous gas flows in the flow parts of turbomachines using the RANS flow models and second order numerical methods is considered. Calculations of flows for a number of turbine and compressor grids on successively refining grids have been performed. We used H-type grids with approximate orthogonalization of cells in the boundary layer. The calculations were carried out using a CFD solver F with the use of an implicit ENO scheme of the second order, a local time step, and a simplified multigrid algorithm. When calculating the flow on fine grids, the following were used: convergence acceleration tools implemented in the solver; truncation of the computational domain with subsequent distribution of the results based on the symmetry property; the computational domain splitting into parts and computations parallelizing. Comparison of the obtained results is carried out, both in terms of qualitative resolution of the complex structure of three-dimensional flows, and in terms of quantitative assessment of losses. Grid convergence was estimated in two ways. In the first, the characteristic two-dimensional distributions of parameters obtained on different grids were visually compared. The purpose of such comparisons was to evaluate the sufficient degree of solution of both the general structure of the flow in grids and its features, namely, shock waves, contact discontinuities, separation zones, wakes, etc. The second estimation method is based on the grid convergence index (GCI). The GCI calculated from the three-dimensional density field was considered in this paper. It is concluded that for scientific research requiring high accuracy of calculations and detailing of the structure of a three-dimensional flow, very fine difference meshes with the number of cells from 10⁶ to 10⁸ in one blade-to-blade channel are needed, while for engineering calculations, under certain conditions, it is sufficient to use meshes with the number of cells less than 1 million in one blade-to-blade channel.