A Numerical Study on the Effect of Tip Clearance on the Performance of Turbine Rotor

The effect of tip clearance is important part for turbomachinery performance. Tip leakage flow due to tip clearance is mixed with passage vortex. Large amount of loss is generated at the mixing region and overall performance of turbomachinery is reduced. Numerical calculation of the lst stage rotor of GE7FA gas turbine is carried out to investigate tip clearance effect on performance, pitchwise variations of velocity profiles, pressure distributions and loss coefficients. A commercial code, CFX-TascFlow is validated in this study.