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Recent trends in the electric energy market such as biomass, waste incineration or combined cycle power plants require innovative solutions in steam turbine design. Variable operating conditions cause significant changes in flow field surrounding the steam turbine last stage blades. Therefore, the enlargement of operating range for last stage blades presents new challenges in design of turbine cascades. Several turbine cascades were designed and analyzed by commercial and in-house software of CTU Prague. Selected profiles were experimentally validated in the high-speed wind tunnel for 2D cascade measurements of the Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences which is equipped by an adjustable supersonic inlet nozzle, perforated inserts at side walls and adjustable perforated tailboard. Comparisons are presented of numerical results with optical and pneumatic measurements for a wide range of inlet and outlet Mach numbers for optimized hub and tip profile cascades.

The paper deals with problems of transonic flow field periodicity downstream of a profile cascade with finite number of blades. The origin of phenomena generating this aperiodicity in transonic wind tunnel is described. The solution of this problem by means of adjustable perforated tailboard is documented by results of optical measurements (interferometry, schlieren methods) on a turbine profile cascade consisting of six blades only. The conditions of formation of limit load regime are described.