Evolution of the wake in a turbine blade passage

The aim of this paper is an experimental analysis of an unsteady flow field in the blade channel where the unsteadiness was generated by the rotating wheel of cylindrical rods. The measurements were performed with the use of hot-wire technique and double X-wire probe. The appli-cation of phase averaging allowed one to reproduce wake motion, which was possible through determination of velocity and turbulence intensity distributions. The role of different mechanisms of wake deformation is discussed. It was also shown that the production of turbulent kinetic energy occurs when the principal stresses within the wake interact with the mean strain. Key words: rotor-stator interaction, blade passage, wake convection, tur-bomachinery 1. Inroduction The flow field in turbomachinery is essentially three-dimensional and unsteady. Three-dimensional phenomena like passage vortices, radial flows and end-wall