Assessment of heat transfer effects on the

performance of a radial turbine using large

eddy simulation

F. Hellstrom1,2

L. Fuchs2

SAAB Automobile Powertrain, Sweden1

Department of Mechanics/CICERO, the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden2

ABSTRACT

One way to reduce fuel consumption and emissions is to downsize the engine in
combination with turbo-charging. The turbine works under highly unsteady flow
conditions, since the exhaust flow is pulsatile, turbulent and with a varying strength
of the axial and secondary flow components. The heat transfer from the fluid to the
turbine housing will be different for a pulsatile flow compared to a non-pulsatile
flow. Therefore, the effects of heat transfer at the walls on the turbine performance
working under pulsatile flow conditions are assessed and quantified by performing a
numerical study with Large Eddy Simulation. Two cases are considered, one case
with adiabatic walls and one case with heat transfer at the walls. The results show
that the difference in the obtained shaft power is small. Even the differences in the
time mean efficiency is small, it only differs with 2 percent units, even though the
heat transferred to surroundings is as large as approximately 60 percent of the
delivered shaft power.

NOMENCLATUR

ui Velocity components (m/s) xi Spatial coordinates (m)

p Pressure (Pa) Pshaft Shaft power (W)
ρ Density (kg/m3) Enthalpy change (W)
T Temperature (K) Cp Specific heat (J/kg K)
h Specific enthalpy (J/kg) η Efficiency
qi Heat flux (W/m2) γ Ratio of specific
Mass flow (kg/s) R Gas constant (287 J/kg K)
t Time (s) Pr Prandtl number
Friction velocity Velocity normalized by the
friction velocity

1 INTRODUCTION
The last decade, downsizing has become more popular and this is due to the
advantages of the smaller turbocharged engine with lower fuel consumption and a
less negative impact on the environment. A key component for downsizing is the
turbocharger. Due to the design of the internal combustion engine, the turbine
works under pulsatile flow conditions. The effects of pulsatile flow on the turbine

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performance have been investigated with both experimental and numerical

methods. For turbines operating under pulsatile flow conditions, the mean efficiency
is lower as compared to non-pulsatile flow conditions for the same mass flow and
pressure ratio. The instantaneous performance can be higher or lower, see for
example the different studies performed by Capobianco, M. and Marelli, S. (1),
Szymko et al. and (2), and Chen et al. (3). It has to be emphasized that it may be
difficult to compute the efficiency in an accurate way, due to the phase shift
between pressure and mass flow and the time it takes for the energy to propagate
from the measuring point to the turbine wheel, as has been showed by for example
by Hellstrom and Fuchs, (4) and (5). It is equally difficult to measure the time
dependent shaft power which, for example makes direct model validation
problematic.

Heat losses will of course affect the performance of the turbine. The heat transfer or
heat losses from the turbine can be divided into two major categories, the internal
heat losses and external heat losses. The internal heat losses is the heat that is
going into the bearing house, and then transferred to the oil, cooling water and
some amount of the heat will go into the compressor. The external losses are the
heat that is transferred to the surroundings due to convection and thermal radiation
from the turbine house. Baines et al. (6) assessed in an experimental work the heat
transfer in turbochargers (working under non-pulsatile flow conditions) with the
objective to develop a 1-D heat transfer model. They concluded that the internal
losses are much greater than the external heat losses and that the heat losses are
strongly dependent on the turbine inlet temperature and the Reynolds number.
Romagnoli and Martinez-Botas (9) conducted experiments on a turbocharger
mounted on an IC-engine, with the objective to assess the heat transfer processes
in a turbocharger and to develop a simplified 1-D heat transfer model. The
measurements show that the radiated heat from the engine strongly affects the
temperature distribution at the turbocharger casing, and this must be taken into
account when using heat transfer models for turbochargers mounted on engines.
Other investigations on heat transfer effects on the turbocharger performance, see
for example the work carried out by Shaaban and Seume (7) and Bohn et al. (8)
more focus on how the heat transfer from the turbine affect the performance of the
compressor.

It may be expected that the heat transfer will be affected by the pulsatile flow,
since the pulsations will affect the boundary layer. Both increase and decrease of
the heat transfer in pulsating flow in pipes has been reported in the literature for
different pulsation frequencies, amplitudes and mean Reynolds numbers. Therefore,
the effects of heat transfer at the walls on the turbine performance working under
pulsatile flow conditions are assessed and quantified by performing a numerical
study with Large Eddy Simulation. The performance and the flow field are also
compared to result from LES computation where the walls are treated as being
adiabatic. The considered turbine is a vane less radial turbine with nine blades with
a size of the turbine is typical for a turbocharger mounted on a 2.0 liters IC engine
of a passenger car.

2 NUMERICAL METHOD AND COMPUTED CASES

2.1 Governing equations and numerical method

The governing equations that describe the conservation of mass, momentum and
energy for a fluid are the Navier-Stokes equations complemented with the equation
of state.

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(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

where τij is the stress tensor, defined as:

(5)

In this study, the governing equations are solved numerically. Since the flow is
pulsatile with separations, the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence modeling
approach is used. In LES, the large scale of the flow is resolved, while the smaller
scales have to be modeled. This also means that the resolved field is 3-dimensional
and time resolved. The modeling of the unresolved scales is done by a so-called
subgrid scale model. Many of available subgrid scale models are to diffusive, as for
example the Smagorinsky model, for this kind of flow. Therefore, an implicit LES
approach is used, which implies that no subgrid scale model at all is used. Instead,
the numerical dissipation will dissipate the energy of the smallest scales. A formal
second order TVD scheme is used for the convection terms, and a first order implicit
Euler scheme has been used for the temporal discretization. As long as the time
step is small, with a Courant number smaller than unity, the accuracy of the
solution will be determined by the spatial schemes. The issue of near wall treatment
of heat-transfer, in general and in particular in the LES framework, is not resolved.
Different methods have been proposed but the applicability of these are not
general. In this study, we have used a model that assumes that the heat-transfer
coefficient is proportional to the wall friction velocity.

(6)

where Pr is the turbulent Prandtl number and Pcorr is correction factor based on the
turbulent and laminar Prandtl number. This model is based on statistical data, and
one can argue if it is valid for pulsatile flow or not.

The wheel is modeled by the sliding mesh technique, which implies that the part of
the mesh that describes the wheel is rotating in relative to the stationary turbine
house. At the interface between the moving and stationary part, the moving mesh
is made to slide past the stationary part. At this sliding interface, the connectivity
for cells on either side of the interface changes at each time step. With this
technique, the effects of blade passage at the tongue will be captured.

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2.2 Computed cases and boundary conditions

The used geometry in this study is a nine bladed nozzle-less radial turbine, with a
size that is typical for a turbocharger mounted on a 2.0 liter IC engine of a
passenger car, and in Figure 1 the used geometry is depicted. The leading edge tip
radius of the wheel is 22.10 mm and the trailing edge tip radius is 18.75 mm. The
waste-gate valve is closed for both cases.

The total number of cells for the mesh used are 1 401 143, with approximately
850 000 cells in the wheel region and approximately 550 000 is located in the
volute and the diffuser. In the wheel, only hexahedron cells are used, while in the
rest of the domain a grid with dominantly hexahedron cells are used. The gap
between the blade tips and shroud are resolved by 4 cells in the radial direction.
The near-walls regions have better resolution than the regions in the “core-region”,
but one should note that it is difficult to define the number of grid points in the
“boundary layer”, since the thickness of that layer varies in the domain, due to
wakes and separation regions. In order to assess the adequacy of the resolution,
energy spectra for the velocity fluctuations was studied and it was found to have
the characteristics -5/3 slope (over a range that varies from almost one order of
magnitude and larger), indicating that the resolution is such that it is in the inertial
subrange. Also, by estimating the missing part of the spectrum, we have found that
the resolved spectrum contains well over 95% of the total turbulent kinetic energy.

Figure 1. Applied inlet conditions to the turbine (left figure) and wall temperatures
for the non-adiabatic case (right figure).

At the inlet to the turbine, time varying mass flow rate and a temperature traces
are applied, which are is depicted in Figure 1. From the specified mass flow rate,
the axial velocity component is computed at each boundary face at the inlet with
the face area and the density. The density is computed with the specified
temperature and the pressure is obtained from the solution. All secondary flow
components are assumed to be zero. The turbulent fluctuations are also neglected.
For a real case, the flow is highly unsteady, with both secondary flow components
and non-uniform axial velocity distribution, due to the pulsatile flow and the
geometrical shape of the manifold upstream. Since the objective is to compare the
effects of heat transfer, the “simplified” inlet boundary condition is used. At the
outlet, a non-reflecting boundary condition is applied. The rotational speed is set to
97 897 rpm, which together with the mass flow and temperature trace that are
applied at the inlet, corresponds to an engine operational point of 1500 rpm for a 4-
cylinders otto engine with wide open throttle. All walls are modeled as being
smooth, which is not the case for the real geometry, but since this a comparative
study, it can be used. One case is modeled with adiabatic walls while the other case
is modeled with a fixed wall temperature. For the case with fixed wall temperatures,
the applied temperature at the wall of the volute is 823 °K and the temperature of

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the wall of the diffuser is set to 726 °K. Those temperatures are from
measurements on an equivalent engine at approximately the same operation point.
The turbine wheel wall is assumed to be adiabatic, since it is gas in the region
between the wheel and back plate, but this cavity is not modeled in this study. The
specified wall temperatures with the computed heat transfer coefficient will of
course determine the heat transfer at the non-adiabatic walls. A more accurate
method is to use a conjugate heat transfer model, where the walls are modeled as
well. But still, it is a question how to specify the boundary conditions at the outside
of the turbine wall. In reality, the boundary condition at the turbine wall depends on
the under-hood configuration.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Results
The first results to be compared are the global figures, such as mass flow averaged
temperature and pressure at inlet and the outlet, shaft power etc. In the second
sub-section, the details of the flow field will be assessed.

3.1.1 Turbine performance and global data

In Figure 2, the shaft power is plotted for the two cases, and as can be seen, the
deviations between the two cases are small. The time mean shaft power for one
pulse differs with approximately 1% (which is less than the numerical uncertainty),
as reported in Table 1.

Figure 2. The time resolved shaft power during one pulse for the two different
cases, (left figure) and the heat transfer from volute and diffuser to the surrounding
air during one pulse (right figure).

Even though the shaft power is almost equal, heat is transferred to the
surroundings for the case with non-adiabatic walls. In Figure 2, the heat losses for
the volute and diffuser are plotted, respectively. The maximum heat loss occurs
when the mass flow rate reaches its maximum value. At this instant, the
temperature of the pulsating gas also reaches its maximum value. The volute has
the largest maximum instantaneous heat transfer rate of the two considered parts,
but the time mean value of the heat transfer for one pulse does not differs
significantly; the time mean value for volute is 1.10 kW and for the diffuser 1.08
kW. This shows the same trend as reported in available literature; see for example
Baines et al. (6). The time mean shaft power during one pulse is 3.66 kW for the
case with heat transfer and 3.71 kW for the case with adiabatic walls. This gives
that time mean heat losses are as large as 59% of the delivered shaft power for
this case. This is due to that the shaft power is very low during the majority of the
pulse, while the heat transfer is not.

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An obvious figure to compare for these two cases is the efficiency, if the flow was
non-pulsatile. In this study, where the geometry is the same for the two cases, the
mass flow rate and the inlet temperature, a time mean efficiency can be computed
and it is defined as:

(7)

The defined efficiency is the heat efficiency if one uses the same the nomenclature
as Hagelstein et al. (10) and Shaaban and Seume (7). The shaft power and the
isentropic power for the different case are integrated over one pulse, and the time
mean efficiency for the case with heat transfer is 61 % and for the case with
adiabatic walls it is 63 %, respectively.

Table 1. Time mean value of global parameters

Case with Case with Ratio
heat transfer adiabatic walls (Xht/Xadiabatic)
Shaft power (kW) 3.66 3.71 99 %
Efficiency (as defined 61 % 63 % 97 %
in (7))
Heat transfer from 1.10 0 -
volute walls (kW)
Heat transfer from 1.08 0 -
diffuser walls (kW)
Static pressure at the 178 179 99 %
inlet (kPa)
Static pressure at the 130 131 99 %
outlet (kPa)
Temperature at the 969 1013 96 %
outlet (K)

The pressure ratio over the turbine is also almost equal for the cases, but the case
with adiabatic walls has a slightly higher pressure level in the whole turbine. This is
due to the higher temperature at the outlet and the used boundary conditions,
which does not set the pressure at the outlet to a fixed value. The temperature at
the outlet is the global parameters that show the largest deviation (except from but
the heat transfer from the walls). The time mean value for the temperature is 969
°K and 1013 °K for the case with heat transfer and the case without, respectively.
By using the time mean total temperature difference and the time mean mass flow
for the two cases, the enthalpy differences can be computed.

(8)

For the considered cases the enthalpy difference is 2.1 kW, which is the same as
the differences between shaft power and heat losses.

3.2 Details of the flow field

To be able to understand the results presented in the previous section, the flow
fields for the two cases have to be assessed. Since no significantly differences
between the two considered cases could be noted during the pulse, two time
instants are chosen, one at high mass flow (at the peak of the inlet mass flow rate)
and one at a mass flow rate at the inlet of approximately 0.05 kg/sec during the
declining phase. Since a method where the wheel is actually rotating is used, a
small difference in the wheel position occurs in some of the plots, which depends on

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that they are not from the exact same time step. The velocity field in the volute
does not differ in a significantly way between the two cases. In Figure 3, the Mach
number and in-plane relative velocity components are plotted for the non-adiabatic
case at an instant with high mass flow rate at the inlet. In these figures, one can
see the effect of tongue, which creates a wake, which then disturbs the flow into
the blade passage that just has passed the tongue. In the area with smallest cross
section the highest Mach number occurs, and for these two cases it is slightly above
unity at high mass flow rates. When the blades have passed the tongue, a tip
vortex starts to roll up. The extent and rotation direction of the leading edge tip
vortex changes during the pulse.

Figure 3. Snapshot of the Mach number and velocity field at high mass flow rate
for the case with non-adiabatic walls. Left figure: Mach number. Right figure: In-
plane relative velocity components. The cutting plane intersects the leading edge of
the wheel in between the hub and shroud.

The temperature distribution for the same instant and cutting plane is showed in
Figure 4. The effects of the heat transfer at the walls can be seen in the right
figure, where a thin thermal boundary layer is located at the walls. One can also
see that the wall has cooled down the gas, especially in the volute. The further the
gas is convected in the volute, the more heat is transferred to the walls and
surroundings. As also can be seen, the temperature in the wheel is much higher for
the case with adiabatic walls. When comparing Figure 3 and Figure 4, one can see
a correlation between the location of the vortices and the regions of low
respectively high temperatures (depending on the case).

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Figure 4. Snapshot of the temperature at high mass flow rate. Left figure: With
adiabatic walls. Right figure: With non-adiabatic walls. The cutting plane intersects
the leading edge of the wheel in between the hub and shroud.

Figure 5. Snapshot of the velocity and temperature at low mass flow rate for the
non-adiabatic case. Left figure: In-plane velocity components. Right figure:
Temperature distribution.

For the adiabatic case, the hot gas at the walls in the volute is convected through
the turbine, with only a small contribution to the shaft power output. At the inlet
region of the wheel, gas with higher temperature is trapped in the tip vortex cores,
but further downstream in the wheel, the high temperature gas regions are mixed
due to the different vortices that are created in the wheel, and then convected out
of the wheel. Since strongest vortices are located in the upper half of the blade
passages, the highest temperature occurs at the shroud side.

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Figure 6. Snapshot of the temperature and velocity at high mass flow rate for the
non-adiabatic case. Left figure: In-plane velocity components. Right figure:
Temperature distribution.

But for the case with heat transfer, the gas near the wall in the volute is cooled
down, and gas with low temperature is convected into the region between the
blades by the tip vortices. Also, at the hub and shroud side of the inlet region to the
wheel, cold gas from the thermal boundary layer is convected into to the wheel.
Since this gas has a lower temperature than the gas in the core region, the gas in
core region will be cooled when it is mixed with the gas in the tip vortices and the
recirculation zone created at the shroud side if the inlet region to wheel.

In the diffuser, the deviation of the temperature is larger between the two cases,
which also can be seen in Table 1, where the time averaged outlet temperature is
significantly higher for the adiabatic case. This is due to the mixing of regions with
gas from the bulk flow and gas from the thermal boundary layer in the wheel and
the heat losses at the walls. The rate of heat transfer from the diffuser becomes
larger when the mass flow rate is low compared to the heat transfer from the
volute. This is due to the vortices that are created in the diffuser downstream of the
wheel. These vortices are created due to the rotating jet like flow that comes out of
the turbine wheel, and are located in the region between the high velocity from the
wheel and the diffuser wall, as depicted in Figure 5 and Figure 6. The vortex
structure closest to the wall is the strongest. At low mass flow rates, hot gas from
instants at high mass flow rate and high temperature is trapped in these vortices.
For the case with non-adiabatic walls, the gas trapped in these vortices is cooled by
the wall, as also is depicted in Figure 5. Since the gas that is trapped in this vortex
has a higher temperature than the gas in volute, the heat transfer from the diffuser
will be higher at instants with low mass flow rate compared to the heat transfer
from the volute. At instants at high mass flow rates, gas with lower temperature is
trapped in the vortex cores, as depicted in Figure 6. The gas with lower
temperature in the vortex has its origin from instants with lower temperature at the
inlet. This then implies that the heat transfer from the diffuser will be relative lower
compared to instants at a low mass flow rate at the inlet. More details of the field
for these two cases can be found in Hellstrom and Fuchs (11).

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4 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

The effects of heat transfer on the performance of a radial turbine working under
pulsatile flow conditions are asses by using CFD with the Large Eddy Simulation
approach. Two cases where considered, one with adiabatic walls and one with heat
transfer at the walls.

The results show that the heat transfer only has a small influence on the turbine
shaft power. The difference in delivered shaft power is very small, the time mean
shaft power over one pulse differs with 1 %. The time mean efficiency is affected,
which is slightly lower for the case with heat losses at the wall. One could expect
that the difference in efficiency should be larger, since the time mean heat transfer
is as high as 59 % of the time mean shaft power. In and downstream of the wheel,
the temperature differences for two cases are significant, and that is due to the
vortex structures created at the inlet of the wheel mixes the cold gas from the
boundary layer into the core region for the non-adiabatic case.

The small effect of the heat losses on the turbine performance shows that the
modeled turbine cannot utilizes all available energy, since heat losses that are
almost as high as 59% of the shaft power, does not affect the shaft power in a
significantly way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The work was sponsored by the Swedish Emission Research Program, EMFO and
SAAB Automobile Powertrain, Sweden. Thanks are also due to the computer centers
at KTH (PDC) and LiU (NSC) for the provided computer resources required carrying
out this work.

© Authors 2010

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