Abstract
The disk cavity of the rotor-stator system is one of important parts of the aero-engine air system. The rotating speed of airflow determines the relative velocity between the airflow and the rotating assembly, so the maintaining characteristic for swirling flow of the rotor-stator cavity will affect the windage of the rotating assembly in the cavity, and the exporting characteristic for swirling flow of the rotor-stator cavity will affect the windage of the rotating assembly in the downstream chamber. Dual-inlet rotor-stator disk cavity is a typical structure of aero-engine. But there are few reports about the flow structure in the dual-inlet rotor-stator disk cavity in the open literature. In this paper, the influence of inflow distributions on maintaining and exporting characteristics for swirling flow was investigated by numerical simulation, aiming at the interaction between the two inflows. The SST turbulence model was well validated against published experimental results. The simulation results show that there are two flow regions in the rotor-stator cavity from the perspective of meridian plane, and there is a rotating vortex in each flow region. In order to quantify the rotational capacity of the airflow, the angular momentum coefficient was defined. Under different inflow distribution ratios, the sizes of the dominant regions of the two vortices in the cavity get varied, which results in the variation of maintaining and exporting characteristics for swirling flow. It was also found that inflow distributions have the same effect on maintaining and exporting characteristics for swirling flow under different rotational Reynolds numbers and different throughflow coefficients, but the capacity of maintaining and exporting swirling flow are different.