  Turbine blades operating in transonic-supersonic regime develop a complex
shock wave system at the trailing edge, a phenomenon that leads to unfavorable
pressure perturbations downstream and can interact with other turbine stages.
Understanding the fluid behavior of the area adjacent to the trailing edge is
essential in order to determine the parameters that have influence on these
pressure fluctuations. Colder flow, bled from the high-pressure compressor, is
often purged at the trailing edge to cool the thin blade edges, affecting the
flow behavior and modulating the intensity and angle of the shock waves system.
However, this purge flow can sometimes generate non-symmetrical configurations
due to a pressure difference that is provoked by the injected flow. In this
work, a combination of RANS simulations and global stability analysis is
employed to explain the physical reasons of this flow bifurcation. Analyzing
the features that naturally appear in the flow and become dominant for some
value of the parameters involved in the problem, an anti-symmetrical global
mode, related to the sudden geometrical expansion of the trailing edge slot, is
identified as the main mechanism that forces the changes in the flow topology.

Fluid Dynamics