The design of three-dimensional turbine blades combined with profiled endwalls

This paper describes a novel design for reducing secondary flow in turbines. The design builds on previous work on non-axisymmetric profiled endwalls by combining them with three-dimensional blade design. Profiled endwalls have been shown to effectively reduce secondary flow but have often been used as a 'retrofit' application where the blade design is left unchanged. In the current paper reverse compound lean is used to prepare the blade row for the application of profiled endwalls. Computational fluid dynamic predictions of the expected performance show benefits over and above those of applying profiled endwalls to the blade row alone. The paper describes the design of the novel geometry for the so-called 'Durham Cascade' and gives predictions of the expected performance.