Numerical Modeling of Wet Steam Flow in Steam Turbine Channel

In power station practice, work is extracted from expanding steam in three stages namely High Pressure(HP), Intermediate Pressure(IP) and Low Pressure(LP) turbines. During the expansion process in the LP turbine, the steam cools down and at some stages, it nucleates to become a two-phase mixture. It is well-acknowledged in the literature that the nucleating and wet stages in steam turbines are less efficient compared to those running with superheated steam. With the advent of water-cooled nuclear reactor, the problem becomes more prominent due to the fact that in water-cooled nuclear reactor, the steam generated is in saturated condition. This steam is then supplied to the HP steam turbine which therefore has also to operate on wet steam. One of the tangible problems associated with wetness is erosion of blading. The newly nucleated droplets are generally too small to cause erosion damage but some of the droplets are collected by the stator and rotor blades to form films and rivulets on the blade and casing walls. On reaching the trailing edges or the tips of the blades, the liquid streams are re-entrained into the flow in the form of coarse droplets. It is these larger droplets that cause the erosion damage and braking loss in steam turbine. However, the formation and behaviour of the droplets have other important thermodynamic and aerodynamic consequences that lower the performance of the wet stages of steam turbines.