A Study of Rotor Cavities and Heat Transfer in a Cooling Process in a Gas Turbine

A high-temperature flow through a gas turbine produces a high rate of turbulent heat transfer between the fluid flow field and the turbine components. The heat transfer process through rotor disks causes thermal stress due to the thermal gradient just as the centrifugal force causes mechanical stresses; thus an accurate analysis for the evaluation of thermal behavior is needed. This paper presents a numerical study of thermal flow analysis in a two-stage turbine in order to understand better the detailed flow and heat transfer mechanisms through the cavity and the rotating rotor-disks. The numerical computations were performed to predict thermal fields throughout the rotating disks. The method used in this paper is the “segregation” method, which requires a much smaller number of grids than actually employed in the computations. The results are presented for temperature distributions through the disk and the velocity fields, which illustrate the interaction between the cooling air flow and gas flow created by the disk rotation. The temperature distribution in the disks shows a reasonable trend. The numerical method developed in this study shows that it can be easily adapted for similar computations for air cooling flow patterns through any rotating blade disks in a gas turbine.