CFD Simulation of hole pattern seals with rough wall functions

The present work discusses ongoing developments on the employment of rough wall functions in the simulation of hole-pattern seals, devices utilized for reducing leakage and increasing rotordynamic performance of turbo-machinery. Rough wall functions were applied to the stator surface, allowing for a simplified model with reduced computational costs. The resulting fields from the simplified model were then compared with a simulation of the rough stator surface and existing experimental data. The simplified model provided a good agreement with the velocity fields and leakage of the experimental data, showing similar representation capacity when compared with the full simulation.