Effect of clocking on entropy noise generation within an aeronautical high pressure turbine stage

This article reports a detailed experimental and numerical study of the clocking effect between entropy wave spots and stator leading edges on the evolution of the entropy wave and on indirect noise generation in a high pressure turbine stage. Experimental campaigns considering burner-representative temperature fluctuations injected upstream of an uncooled high-pressure gas turbine stage have been performed in the high-speed closed-loop test rig of the Fluid Machine Laboratory (LFM) of the Politecnico di Milano. Acoustic measurements focused on entropy noise generation have been carried out by the German Aerospace Center, DLR with two flush mounted in-duct microphone arrays. URANS CFD simulations with and without entropy fluctuations imposed at the stage inlet were performed with the TRAF code, developed by the Università degli Studi di Firenze. A numerical post-processing procedure, based on the time and space discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the conservative variables, has been implemented to extract the low-frequency content connected to the entropy fluctuations and indirect noise emissions. Simulations show an overall good agreement with the experiments, especially at the stage outlet thus confirming the possibility to predict entropy noise by means of URANS simulations with time varying inlet conditions. By exploiting the combination of experiments and simulations, the evolution of the entropy wave, the identification of entropy noise generation areas, and the evaluation of indirect noise emissions, for the different clocking positions were properly assessed. This study also demonstrates that this type of simulations can be used for the geometric design optimization of combustor/turbine coupling performing detailed parametric studies concerning the clocking position of the perturbation source in order to reduce the turbine-combustor interactions and the indirect noise emissions.