Investigation of the Two-Phase Flow Field of the GTX100 Compressor Inlet During Off-Line Washing

A modern gas turbine compressor, with its highly aerodynamically loaded blades, is sensitive to changes in profile shape and to surface roughness. Fouling is inevitable, despite highly efficient filtration systems. The remedy to this problem is washing. There are two different approaches, on-line or off-line washing. The off-line wash is the most effective one, whilst on-line washing only prolongs the interval between off-line washes. Most findings in this field are highly empirical, being based on some 50 years of industrial gas turbine operation. This paper is an investigation of the two-phase flow in the bellmouth of the compressor during off-line washing conditions. The unit under study was the GTX100 turbo-set. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used in this paper to perform a detailed study of the flow field. The main emphasis has been on studying the characteristics of the injected spray used for cleaning of the compressor. The benefit of heating this fluid is of special interest, since if this heating can be avoided, the outage time for the off-line compressor wash can be shortened. To provide the CFD computations with accurate boundary conditions for the spray, laser-based measurements of a spray, originating from an authentic wash nozzle, have been conducted. The commercial CFD program Star-Cd has been used for all computations. The computations show that the water injected, regardless of its inlet temperature, is cooled down to ambient air temperature well before the spray reaches the inlet guide vanes. This indicates that heating of the wash fluid can be abolished. The airflow seems not to be to influenced by the injected fluid to any great extend.