The effects of an industrial gas turbine’s Exhaust Collector Box (ECB) geometry on static pressure recovery and total pressure loss were investigated in this study experimentally and computationally. This study aims to further understand how exit boundary conditions affect the performance of a diffuser system as well as the accuracy of industry standard computational models. A design of experiments approach was taken using a Box-Behnken design method for investigating three geometric parameters of the ECB. In this investigation, the exhaust diffuser remained constant through each test, with only the ECB being varied. A system performance analysis was conducted for each geometry using the total pressure loss and static pressure recovery from the diffuser inlet to the ECB exit. Velocity and total pressure profiles obtained with a hotwire anemometer and Kiel probe at the exit of the diffuser and at the exit of the ECB are also presented in this study. A total of 13 different ECB geometries are investigated at a Reynolds number of 60,000. Results obtained from these experimental tests are used to investigate the accuracy of a 3-dimensional RANS with realizable k-ε turbulence model from the commercial software package Star-CCM+. The study confirms the existence of strong counter-rotating helical vortices within the ECB which significantly affect the flow within the diffuser. Evidence of a strong recirculation zone within the ECB was found to force separation within the exhaust diffuser which imposed a circumferentially asymmetric pressure field at the inlet of the diffuser. Increasing the ECB width proved to decrease the magnitude of this effect, increasing the diffuser protrusion reduced this effect to a lesser degree. The combined effect of increasing the ECB Length and Width increased the expansion area ratio, proving to increase the system pressure recovery iv by as much as 19% over the nominal case. Additionally, the realizable k-ε turbulence model was able to accurately rank all 13 cases in order by performance; however the predicted magnitudes of the pressure recovery and total pressure loss were poor for the cases with strong vortices. For the large volume cases with weak vortices, the CFD was able to accurately represent the total pressure loss of the system within 5%.

A subsonic wind tunnel facility was designed and built to test and optimize various diffuser-collector box geometries at the one-twelfth scale.  The facility was designed to run continuously at an inlet Mach number of 0.42 and an inlet hydraulic diameter Reynolds number of 340,000. Different combinations of diffusers, hubs, and exhaust collector boxes were designed and evaluated for overall optimum performance. Both 3-hole and 5-hole probes were traversed into the flow to generate multiple diffuser inlet and collector exit performance profile plots. Surface oil flow visualization was performed to gain an understanding of the complex 3D flow structures inside the diffuser-collector subsystem. The cutback radial hardware was found to increase the subsystem pressure recovery by over 10% from baseline resulting in an approximate 1% increase in gas turbine power output. / Master of Science