Influence of speed and frequency towards the automotive turbocharger turbine performance under pulsating flow conditions

The ever-increasing demand for low carbon applications in automotive industry has intensified the development of highly efficient engines and energy recovery devices. Even though there are significant developments in the alternative powertrains such as full electric, their full deployment is hindered by high costing and unattractive life-cycle energy and emission balance. Thus powertrain based on highly efficient internal combustion engines are still considered to be the mainstream for years to come. Traditionally, turbocharger has been an essential tool to boost the engine power, however in recent years it is seen as an enabling technology for engine downsizing. It is a well-known fact that a turbocharger turbine in an internal combustion engine operates in a highly pulsating exhaust flow. There are numerous studies looking into the complex interaction of the pulsating exhaust gas within the turbocharger turbine, however the phenomena is still not fully integrated into the design stage. Industry practice is still to design and match the turbine to an engine based on steady performance maps. The current work is undertaken with the mind to move one step closer towards fully integrating the pulsating flow performance into the turbocharger turbine design. This paper presents the development efforts and results from a full 3-D CFD model of a turbocharger turbine stage. The simulations were conducted at 30,000 rpm and 48,000 rpm (50% and 80% design speed respectively) for both 20 Hz and 80 Hz pulsating flow inlet conditions. Complete validation procedure using cold-flow experimental data is also described. The temporal and spatial resolutions of the incidence angle at the rotor leading edge suggest that the circumference variation is little (7%) as compared to its variation in time as the pulse progresses. The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship of the turbine speed, as well as the pulsating flow frequency to its performance. It was found that there are no direct instantaneous relationship between the pulsating pressure at the turbine inlet and the turbine efficiency, except when one considers an additional parameter, namely the incidence angle. This paper also intends to investigate the potential loss of information if the performance parameters are simply averaged without considering the instantaneous effects.