Tao Yang  M.S.M.E.

 Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis, August 2002.

The Development of A Compressible Lattice Boltzmann Model for Turbomachine Applications

Major Professor: Andrew T. Hsu

Abstract

The purpose of the present work is to extend the Lattice Boltzmann (LB) method to the simulation of flows in turbomachinery. In the last decade, the LB method has been successfully developed into a promising alternative to the traditional CFD method. This simple and straightforward method has been shown to be capable of simulations of many complex flow phenomena. However, applications of the LB method to real life problems have been a few. In the present work, efforts have been made to extend the LB method to the simulation of turbomachinery, specifically, simulation of cascades. In the present work, a compressible LB model proposed by Sun et al.[27] has been estended successfully to the simulation of and several new techniques have been successfully developed to handle the complex geometry in cascade simulations. A new boundary treatment has been introduced to the present LB model to simulate the slip wall boundary. A new mesh treatment has devised in the present work to cover an irregular computational domain with regular mesh. Simulations have been carried out for three different cascades, including, the wedge cascade, C3X cascade and VKI cascade. Good agreements between the present results and both experimental results and pervious numerical results have been shown. This is the first time that a LB simulation of turbomachinery flows has been reported. The LB method is generally regarded as a naturally parallel scheme. The parallel performance of the new LB model is studied in the present work. The parallelization efficiency has been tested on up to 250 processors.