Commissioning of a Newly Designed Experimental Facility for Hot Gas Ingestion Investigation

The aim of the present paper is to present first preliminary results obtained on an experimental facility which has been recently designed to study the flow ingestion from the main annulus into the first stage stator-rotor cavity of a high-pressure turbine. The test rig has been designed as a single stage facility suitable to be run at cold flow conditions and equipped with interchangeable stator and rotor cover plates aiming to mimic different real engine rim seals as close as possible. Besides the usual gas sampling measurements, the main innovation of the current test rig resides in the possibility to exploit optical accesses on the stator disk to obtain 2D effectiveness maps on both stator and rotor discs. Before starting the experimental campaign, proper commissioning tests have been performed. Afterwards, results obtained by using standard concentration techniques are reported along with preliminary ones obtained through the use of PSP to illustrate the feasibility of the optical measurements but also to demonstrate the importance of this approach in providing valuable data that can be used to validate future CFD models.