Performance Measurements of a Unique Louver Particle Separator for Gas Turbine Engines

Solid particles, such as sand, ingested into gas turbine engines, reduce the coolant flow in the turbine by blocking cooling channels in the secondary flow path. One method to remove solid particles from the secondary flow path is to use an inertial particle separator because of its ability to incur minimal pressure losses in high flow rate applications. In this paper, an inertial separator is presented that is made up of an array of louvers followed by a static collector. The performance of two inertial separator configurations was measured in a unique test facility. Performance measurements included pressure loss and collection efficiency for a range of Reynolds numbers and sand sizes. To complement the measurements, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional computational results are presented for comparison. Computational predictions of pressure loss agreed with measurements at high Reynolds numbers, whereas predictions of sand collection efficiency for a sand size range 0–200μm agreed within 10% of experimental measurements over the range of Reynolds numbers. Collection efficiency values were measured to be as high as 35%, and pressure loss measurements were equivalent to less than 1% pressure loss in an engine application.