In the first part of this two-part blog post I used the ORC2021 conference to reflect on my academic journey so far. In this second part, lets dig into what the presented research was all about - simulating an existing supersonic stator vane under two-phase inlet conditions. There is even the chance to watch the recorded presentation!

So, within my RAEng Research Fellowship I am exploring turbomachinery designs that could potentially facilitate an improvement in waste-heat recovery applications by allowing two-phase expansion. Earlier in the year I reported on the first paper from my fellowship which explored the design of such components and reported some promising preliminary results.

This previous research worked on the premise of designing a new turbine design to achieve this two-phase expansion process. But an interesting question arises, which is “Could I use an existing stator design, originally intended for single-phase (vapour) expansion, for these two-phase conditions?”

Well, the work presented at ORC2021 was an initial step towards trying to answer this question. In collaboration with LUT University in Finland, we set about trying to simulate the performance of the stator vane currently installed on LUT’s ORC test loop under two-phase inlet conditions with some interesting results.

You can watch the recorded presentation below.

Spolier alert

The results indicate that the existing stator may be able to accommodate up to a 35% to 65% mixture of liquid to vapour without its performance being significantly affected which is a positive result. However, I say may as these results are subject to simplistic assumptions that require further investigation.