scholarly journals Inverse Heat Transfer Engineering Design for Internally Cooled Gas Turbine Airfoils

Author(s):  
Francisco J. T. Cunha ◽  
David A. DeAngelis

In the design and development of modern gas turbine machines for efficient power generation in combined cycle applications, nozzle segments with airfoils and sidewalls need to be effectively cooled to operate in gas temperature environments in the excess of the melting point of the material of construction. Particular attention is given to the thermal evaluation as it affects component design life and performance. In this context, an optimization methodology is prescribed for inverse determination of required coolant heat transfer as a function of hot gas conditions and subjected to constraints associated with allowable metal temperature. A general boundary element method is used in the optimization process to provide a relatively fast and economically feasible design procedure. The optimized set of heat transfer results are converged when the external metal temperatures fall within acceptable limits. Once the magnitude and distribution of required coolant heat transfer coefficients are obtained, the cooling technique can be devised using available or referenced correlations for impingement jets through insert plates, banks of pin fins, turbulators, or just simply forced convection through internal passages. An illustrative example is presented with a Joukowski airfoil using a finite element method as an alternative method of solution for comparison and verification.

Author(s):  
Howard M. Brilliant ◽  
Anil K. Tolpadi

Combined cycle units have become very popular in recent years as a source of power generation. Such units have a gas turbine as the topping cycle and a steam turbine as the bottoming cycle and can reach combined cycle efficiencies as high as 60%. The exhaust from the gas turbine is passed through a heat exchanger in which steam is generated for the steam turbine. This combined arrangement makes it less polluting as well. An important element of a combined cycle power plant is the steam turbine, which is the subject of this paper. Improvements to the design of advanced steam turbines require an improved understanding of the heat transfer within the various components of the unit. Physics-based ANSYS models for typical GE high pressure and intermediate pressure units have been developed. Components such as the rotor, diaphragm, and shells have been analyzed. The boundary conditions were derived from full-load, steady state flow analyses, steam turbine performance code outputs and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses to develop normalized (non-dimensional) local flow conditions, with the normalizing parameters based on key cycle parameters. These normalized local flow conditions and cycle parameters were then used to define local transient boundary temperatures and heat transfer coefficients for input to the thermal ANSYS models. Transient analyses of components were performed. The results were compared with temperature measurements taken during the complete cycle of an operational steam turbine to validate and improve the methodology, and were applied to structural models of the components to predict their thermal growth and the net impact on the clearance between the rotor and diaphragms and other secondary flow paths in the steam turbine, including the packing seals. This paper will focus on the thermal modeling of a typical steam turbine. It will discuss the process used (summarized above) and the basic equations employed in the analyses. Results will be compared with shell temperature measurements obtained during the start up of a steam turbine in the field. Implications of the thermal results on power systems operation will be discussed. Plans for future improvements will be presented.


Author(s):  
Jun Su Park ◽  
Namgeon Yun ◽  
Hokyu Moon ◽  
Kyung Min Kim ◽  
Sin-Ho Kang ◽  
...  

This paper presents thermal analyses of the cooling system of a transition piece, which is one of the primary hot components in a gas turbine engine. The thermal analyses include heat transfer distributions induced by heat and fluid flow, temperature, and thermal stresses. The purpose of this study is to provide basic thermal and structural information on transition piece, to facilitate their maintenance and repair. The study is carried out primarily by numerical methods, using the commercial software, Fluent and ANSYS. First, the combustion field in a combustion liner with nine fuel nozzles is analyzed to determine the inlet conditions of a transition piece. Using the results of this analysis, pressure distributions inside a transition piece are calculated. The outside of the transition piece in a dump diffuser system is also analyzed. Information on the pressure differences is then used to obtain data on cooling channel flow (one of the methods for cooling a transition piece). The cooling channels have exit holes that function as film-cooling holes. Thermal and flow analyses are carried out on the inside of a film-cooled transition piece. The results are used to investigate the adjacent temperatures and wall heat transfer coefficients inside the transition piece. Overall temperature and thermal stress distributions of the transition piece are obtained. These results will provide a direction to improve thermal design of transition piece.


Author(s):  
Aleksei S. Tikhonov ◽  
Andrey A. Shvyrev ◽  
Nikolay Yu. Samokhvalov

One of the key factors ensuring gas turbine engines (GTE) competitiveness is improvement of life, reliability and fuel efficiency. However fuel efficiency improvement and the required increase of turbine inlet gas temperature (T*g) can result in gas turbine engine life reduction because of hot path components structural properties deterioration. Considering circumferential nonuniformity, local gas temperature T*g can reach 2500 K. Under these conditions the largest attention at designing is paid to reliable cooling of turbine vanes and blades. At present in design practice and scientific publications comparatively little attention is paid to detailed study of turbine split rings thermal condition. At the same time the experience of modern GTE operation shows high possibility of defects occurrence in turbine 1st stage split ring. This work objective is to perform conjugate numerical simulation (gas dynamics + heat transfer) of thermal condition for the turbine 1st stage split ring in a modern GTE. This research main task is to determine the split ring thermal condition by defining the conjugate gas dynamics and heat transfer result in ANSYS CFX 13.0 package. The research subject is the turbine 1st stage split ring. The split ring was simulated together with the cavity of cooling air supply from vanes through the case. Besides turbine 1st stage vanes and blades have been simulated. Patterns of total temperature (T*Max = 2000 °C) and pressure and turbulence level at vanes inlet (19.2 %) have been defined based on results of calculating the 1st stage vanes together with the combustor. The obtained results of numerical simulation are well coherent with various experimental studies (measurements of static pressure and temperature in supply cavity, metallography). Based on the obtained performance of the split ring cooling system and its thermal condition, the split ring design has been considerably modified (one supply cavity has been split into separate cavities, the number and arrangement of perforation holes have been changed etc.). All these made it possible to reduce considerably (by 40…50 °C) the split ring temperature comparing with the initial design. The design practice has been added with the methods which make it possible to define thermal condition of GTE turbine components by conjugating gas dynamics and heat transfer problems and this fact will allow to improve the designing level substantially and to consider the influence of different factors on aerodynamics and thermal state of turbine components in an integrated programming and computing suite.


2003 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jae Su Kwak ◽  
Je-Chin Han

Experimental investigations were performed to measure the detailed heat transfer coefficients and film cooling effectiveness on the squealer tip of a gas turbine blade in a five-bladed linear cascade. The blade was a two-dimensional model of a first stage gas turbine rotor blade with a profile of the GE-E3 aircraft gas turbine engine rotor blade. The test blade had a squealer (recessed) tip with a 4.22% recess. The blade model was equipped with a single row of film cooling holes on the pressure side near the tip region and the tip surface along the camber line. Hue detection based transient liquid crystals technique was used to measure heat transfer coefficients and film cooling effectiveness. All measurements were done for the three tip gap clearances of 1.0%, 1.5%, and 2.5% of blade span at the two blowing ratios of 1.0 and 2.0. The Reynolds number based on cascade exit velocity and axial chord length was 1.1×106 and the total turning angle of the blade was 97.9 deg. The overall pressure ratio was 1.2 and the inlet and exit Mach numbers were 0.25 and 0.59, respectively. The turbulence intensity level at the cascade inlet was 9.7%. Results showed that the overall heat transfer coefficients increased with increasing tip gap clearance, but decreased with increasing blowing ratio. However, the overall film cooling effectiveness increased with increasing blowing ratio. Results also showed that the overall film cooling effectiveness increased but heat transfer coefficients decreased for the squealer tip when compared to the plane tip at the same tip gap clearance and blowing ratio conditions.


Author(s):  
Tomoki Taniguchi ◽  
Ryoji Tamai ◽  
Yoshihiko Muto ◽  
Satoshi Takami ◽  
Ryozo Tanaka ◽  
...  

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd (KHI) has started a comprehensive program to further improve performance and availability of existing Kawasaki gas turbines. In the program, one of the Kawasaki’s existing gas turbine was selected from the broad product line and various kinds of technology were investigated and adopted to further improve its thermal performance and availability. The new technologies involve novel film cooling of turbine nozzles, advanced and large-scale numerical simulations, new thermal barrier coating. The thermal performance target is combined cycle efficiency of 51.6% and the target ramp rate is 20% load per minute. The program started in 2015 and engine testing has just started. In this paper, details of the program are described, focusing on design procedure.


Author(s):  
Andreas Jeromin ◽  
Christian Eichler ◽  
Berthold Noll ◽  
Manfred Aigner

Numerical predictions of conjugate heat transfer on an effusion cooled flat plate were performed and compared to detailed experimental data. The commercial package CFX® is used as flow solver. The effusion holes in the referenced experiment had an inclination angle of 17 degrees and were distributed in a staggered array of 7 rows. The geometry and boundary conditions in the experiments were derived from modern gas turbine combustors. The computational domain contains a plenum chamber for coolant supply, a solid wall and the main flow duct. Conjugate heat transfer conditions are applied in order to couple the heat fluxes between the fluid region and the solid wall. The fluid domain contains 2.4 million nodes, the solid domain 300,000 nodes. Turbulence modeling is provided by the SST turbulence model which allows the resolution of the laminar sublayer without wall functions. The numerical predictions of velocity and temperature distributions at certain locations show significant differences to the experimental data in velocity and temperature profiles. It is assumed that this behavior is due to inappropriate modeling of turbulence especially in the effusion hole. Nonetheless, the numerically predicted heat transfer coefficients are in good agreement with the experimental data at low blowing ratios.


Author(s):  
E. Findeisen ◽  
B. Woerz ◽  
M. Wieler ◽  
P. Jeschke ◽  
M. Rabs

This paper presents two different numerical methods to predict the thermal load of a convection-cooled gas-turbine blade under realistic operating temperature conditions. The subject of the investigation is a gas-turbine rotor blade equipped with an academic convection-cooling system and investigated at a cascade test-rig. It consists of three cooling channels, which are connected outside the blade, so allowing cooling air temperature measurements. Both methods use FE models to obtain the temperature distribution of the solid blade. The difference between these methods lies in the generation of the heat transfer coefficients along the cooling channel walls which serve as a boundary condition for the FE model. One method, referred to as the FEM1D method, uses empirical one-dimensional correlations known from the available literature. The other method, the FEM2D method, uses three-dimensional CFD simulations to obtain two-dimensional heat transfer coefficient distributions. The numerical results are compared to each other as well as to experimental data, so that the benefits and limitations of each method can be shown and validated. Overall, this paper provides an evaluation of the different methods which are used to predict temperature distributions in convection-cooled gas-turbines with regard to accuracy, numerical cost and the limitations of each method. The temperature profiles obtained in all methods generally show good agreement with the experiments. However, the more detailed methods produce more accurate results by causing higher numerical costs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. e138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sándor Szénási

The accurate knowledge of Heat Transfer Coefficients is essential for the design of precise heat transfer operations. The determination of these values requires Inverse Heat Transfer Calculations, which are usually based on heuristic optimisation techniques, like Genetic Algorithms or Particle Swarm Optimisation. The main bottleneck of these heuristics is the high computational demand of the cost function calculation, which is usually based on heat transfer simulations producing the thermal history of the workpiece at given locations. This Direct Heat Transfer Calculation is a well parallelisable process, making it feasible to implement an efficient GPU kernel for this purpose. This paper presents a novel step forward: based on the special requirements of the heuristics solving the inverse problem (executing hundreds of simulations in a parallel fashion at the end of each iteration), it is possible to gain a higher level of parallelism using multiple graphics accelerators. The results show that this implementation (running on 4 GPUs) is about 120 times faster than a traditional CPU implementation using 20 cores. The latest developments of the GPU-based High Power Computations area were also analysed, like the new NVLink connection between the host and the devices, which tries to solve the long time existing data transfer handicap of GPU programming.


Author(s):  
Karthik Krishnaswamy ◽  
◽  
Srikanth Salyan ◽  

The performance of a gas turbine during the service life can be enhanced by cooling the turbine blades efficiently. The objective of this study is to achieve high thermohydraulic performance (THP) inside a cooling passage of a turbine blade having aspect ratio (AR) 1:5 by using discrete W and V-shaped ribs. Hydraulic diameter (Dh) of the cooling passage is 50 mm. Ribs are positioned facing downstream with angle-of-attack (α) of 30° and 45° for discrete W-ribs and discerte V-ribs respectively. The rib profiles with rib height to hydraulic diameter ratio (e/Dh) or blockage ratio 0.06 and pitch (P) 36 mm are tested for Reynolds number (Re) range 30000-75000. Analysis reveals that, area averaged Nusselt numbers of the rib profiles are comparable, with maximum difference of 6% at Re 30000, which is within the limits of uncertainty. Variation of local heat transfer coefficients along the stream exhibited a saw tooth profile, with discrete W-ribs exhibiting higher variations. Along spanwise direction, discrete V-ribs showed larger variations. Maximum variation in local heat transfer coefficients is estimated to be 25%. For experimented Re range, friction loss for discrete W-ribs is higher than discrete-V ribs. Rib profiles exhibited superior heat transfer capabilities. The best Nu/Nuo achieved for discrete Vribs is 3.4 and discrete W-ribs is 3.6. In view of superior heat transfer capabilities, ribs can be deployed in cooling passages near the leading edge, where the temperatures are very high. The best THPo achieved is 3.2 for discrete V-ribs and 3 for discrete W-ribs at Re 30000. The ribs can also enhance the power-toweight ratio as they can produce high thermohydraulic performances for low blockage ratios.


Author(s):  
Wesly S. Anderson ◽  
Marc D. Polanka ◽  
Joseph Zelina ◽  
Dave S. Evans ◽  
Scott D. Stouffer ◽  
...  

Film cooling plays a critical role in providing effective thermal protection to components in modern gas turbine engines. A significant effort has been undertaken over the last 40 years to improve the distribution of coolant and to ensure that the airfoil is protected by this coolant from the hot gases in the freestream. This film, under conditions with high fuel-air ratios, may actually be detrimental to the underlying metal. The presence of unburned fuel from an upstream combustor may interact with this oxygen rich film coolant jet resulting in secondary combustion. The completion of the reactions can increase the gas temperature locally resulting in higher heat transfer to the airfoil directly along the path line of the film coolant jet. This secondary combustion could damage the turbine blade, resulting in costly repair, reduction in turbine life, or even engine failure. However, knowledge of film cooling in a reactive flow is very limited. The current study explores the interaction of cooling flow from typical cooling holes with the exhaust of a fuel-rich well-stirred reactor operating at high temperatures over a flat plate. Surface temperatures, heat flux, and heat transfer coefficients are calculated for a variety of reactor fuel-to-air ratios, cooling hole geometries, and blowing ratios. Emphasis is placed on the difference between a normal cylindrical hole, an inclined cylindrical hole, and a fan-shaped cooling hole. When both air and nitrogen are injected through the cooling holes, the changes in surface temperature can be directly correlated with the presence of the reaction. Photographs of the localized burning are presented to verify the extent and locations of the reaction.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document