RESERACH ON STEAM CONDENSING FLOWS IN NOZZLES WITH SHOCK WAVE

Abstract

In the Institute of Power Engineering and Turbomachinery of the Silesian University of Technology there is an experimental facility dedicated to the wet steam flow investigation through the nozzles and linear cascades, especially to the identification of the both aerodynamic and thermodynamic losses.The proposed work concerns  a novel experimental research comprising the new and more effective  techniques for transonic wet steam flow through Laval nozzles. The applied modern experimental techniques are based on the static pressure measurement and Schlieren technique for flow-field visualization. The Schlieren technique is a well-known method to visualize density gradients in compressible flows. It translates phase differences into amplitudes and sometimes color differences that can be seen.A synchronized instantaneous measurement of the pressure and Schlieren photographs allows to capture unsteady effects in the steam condensing flows. Additionally, the chemical analysis of the condensate is planned in order to estimate the impurities content in steam. It confirms the type of the investigated condensation phenomenon, homogeneous or heterogeneous one. This technique has been already validated and used for losses estimation for very simple test cases.Experimental results will be comparison with CFD calculations. The CFD results will be made using ANSYS-CFX and our in-house code for modelling the steam condensing flows. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The presented work was supported by the National Science Centre founds within the PBU–7/RIE5/2012.