Abstract
Steam turbine plays an important role in the power-generation industry. The power output of the low-pressure (LP) cylinder accounts for about 50% of the total power output of a steam turbine. Therefore, improving the efficiency of the LP cylinder is important. The response-surface method is used in this work to optimise the seven-stage turbine in the LP cylinder of a 600 MW steam turbine. The LP cylinder’s efficiency is chosen as the objective function and the samples needed to establish the response surface are obtained by solving the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with the ANSYS CFX. The stators’ stagger angles and stacking lines are selected as the design variables. The former is determined to redistribute the enthalpy drop among turbine stages more reasonably and the latter is used to improve each stage’s efficiency by forming bent and twisted stators. The efficiency and power of this LP cylinder are increased by 0.43% and 0.72%, respectively. Meanwhile, the mass flow rate is maintained nearly unchanged.
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Recommended by Associate Editor Tong Seop Kim
Yu Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Institute of Turbomachinery, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University. His research fields include wet steam condensing flow, multistage turbine analysis, optimisation method and wetness loss calculation.
Liang Li received his Ph.D. degree in Power Engineering and Engineering Thermophysics from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2002. He is now an associate professor at the School of Energy and Power, Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China. His research interests include thermodynamics of steam turbine, wet steam and moist air flows with non-equilibrium condensation.
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Li, Y., Li, L., Zhao, T. et al. Aerodynamic optimisation of a low-pressure multistage turbine using the response-surface method. J Mech Sci Technol 27, 2537–2546 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-013-0638-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-013-0638-1