The main parts of the annular combustor liner walls of the Siemens gas turbine SGT-800 are convectively cooled using rib turbulated cooling. Due to the serial system of cooling and combustion air there is a potential of further reduction of total combustor pressure drop by improvements of the cooling system. Apart from the rib cooling, also the cooling channel bypass entrance is related to a significant part of the total cooling system pressure drop. In this study, an investigation is performed for a rib cooled channel which is related to the considered combustor liner and where empirical correlations are available in order to evaluate the methodology used. The study includes an assessment of the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models available within commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes and includes also an investigation of model size when using periodic boundaries for LES simulations. It is well known that a small geometrical distance in the direction of the periodic boundaries may have a strong effect on the flow field but is often neglected in practice in order to speed up LES calculations. Here the effect is assessed in order to show what size is required for accurate results, both for time averaged and transient results. In addition too small domains may be affected by spurious low frequencies originating from the periodic boundaries requiring additional simulation time for time converged statistics, but also the averages may be significantly affected. In addition the simulation period for time converged statistics is evaluated in order to show that larger model size in the periodic direction does not necessarily require longer practical simulation time, due to the fact that larger volumes may be used for the combined time and space averaging. The aim is to obtain practical guidelines for LES calculations for internal cooling flows. Then the study is extended step by step to investigate the importance due to high Reynolds number, variable fluid properties and large temperature gradients in order to cover the ranges and specifics required for SGT-800 engine conditions.
Generalized bijective maps between G-parking functions, spanning trees, and the Tutte polynomial
