Rotor-Stator Interaction Analysis Using the Navier-Stokes Equations and a Multigrid Method

A recently developed, time-accurate multigrid viscous solver has been extended to the analysis of unsteady rotor–stator interaction. In the proposed method, a fully implicit time discretization is used to remove stability limitations. By means of a dual time-stepping approach, a four-stage Runge–Kutta scheme is used in conjunction with several accelerating techniques typical of steady-state solvers, instead of traditional time-expensive factorizations. The accelerating strategies include local time stepping, residual smoothing, and multigrid. Two-dimensional viscous calculations of unsteady rotor–stator interaction in the first stage of a modern gas turbine are presented. The stage analysis is based on the introduction of several blade passages to approximate the stator:rotor count ratio. Particular attention is dedicated to grid dependency in space and time as well as to the influence of the number of blades included in the calculations.