Bayley and Conway ’ s Paper on Turbomachinery Internal Air Systems

Bayley and Conway’s 1964 paper [1], motivated by shortcomings in industrial design methods and understanding, was one of the first investigations of flow and heat transfer in turbomachinery rotating disc cavities. At the time of the study, a theoretical or numerical treatment was considered intractable and so experiments were undertaken. These paved the way for a large body of further research in this area. Today, use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in industry for internal air flow prediction is now commonplace. In this review of Bayley and Conway’s paper it is shown that the unshrouded disc cavity flow considered is still challenging for modern CFD methods, and so the experimental data remains of interest to researchers in the field.