Generalised Mixing-Plane Method for Compressible Reacting-Mixture Flows in Steady Multiphysics Turbomachinery Simulations

Abstract

The mixing-plane method plays a pivotal role in steady simulations of multiple turbomachinery components. With advances in computational power, a whole-engine gas turbine simulation is no longer an elusive approach. However, whole-engine simulations require simultaneous coupling of the compressor, turbine and combustor. A key challenge is that the working fluid after the combustor can no longer be treated as a perfect gas, since the combustion introduces composition variations and combustion products. Conventional mixing-plane methods based on a fixed-composition gas cannot guarantee a thermodynamically consistent mixed-out state. To overcome the difficulty, this paper extends the classic mixing-plane approach to handle compressible reacting flows. The nonlinearity in the thermodynamic closure is addressed using a novel nested algorithm combining an outer pressure-root search with an inner enthalpy inversion. Physical state checks and power-law pressure sampling are incorporated to improve numerical robustness at low normal velocities where the pressure root approaches its upper physical bound. The performance of the method is demonstrated in three configurations: a quasi-1D interface test elucidating the thermodynamic stiffness of the proposed mixing-plane formulation for different fuel types and flow conditions; the Darmstadt transonic compressor case that verifies the proposed method reduces to the classic mixing-plane formulation when the mixture fraction reduces to zero; and a whole-engine simulation of the KJ66 micro-turbojet is used to demonstrate the performance of the method for multiphysics turbomachinery simulations. Good agreement with experimental data is observed, and the maximum relative mass-flow error across the mixing planes remains below 0.11%, demonstrating conservative and thermodynamically consistent interface coupling for compressible reacting turbomachinery flows.