Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis for a Film-Cooled Turbine Vane

Author(s):  
Ron Ho Ni ◽  
William Humber ◽  
George Fan ◽  
P. Dean Johnson ◽  
Jim Downs ◽  
...  

A conjugate heat transfer analysis methodology has been defined and applied to an Air Force film cooled turbine vane consisting of 648 cooling holes. An unstructured computational mesh was used to model both the fluid and metal sides of the turbine vane. A summary of the numerical methods employed by Code Leo is provided along with a description of the coupling procedure employed between the fluid and heat conduction computations. Numerical simulations were conducted at multiple mesh resolutions to assess accuracy and repeatability. A detailed review is presented for the numerical solution obtained from a fine mesh consisting of 24 million elements (8 million solid, 16 million fluid) covering all 648 film holes. Results showed that cooled air from the film holes formed a protective layer around the airfoil surfaces and endwalls as intended. Low metal temperatures were present not only on the external surfaces exposed to hot gas, but also around the entrances to the film cooling holes. Cooled air was also observed to pile up along the pressure surface at mid-span. Solution convergence was achieved in approximately 15,000 iterations and 100 hours elapsed time on a dual-socket Intel E5504 workstation. The combination of fast turnaround time with accurate metal temperature prediction will enable conjugate heat transfer analysis to be easily incorporated into routine design processes to better address durability goals.

Author(s):  
Young Seok Kang ◽  
Dong-Ho Rhee ◽  
Sanga Lee ◽  
Bong Jun Cha

Abstract Conjugate heat transfer analysis method has been highlighted for predicting heat exchange between fluid domain and solid domain inside high-pressure turbines, which are exposed to very harsh operating conditions. Then it is able to assess the overall cooling effectiveness considering both internal cooling and external film cooling at the cooled turbine design step. In this study, high-pressure turbine nozzles, which have three different film cooling holes arrangements, were numerically simulated with conjugate heat transfer analysis method for predicting overall cooling effectiveness. The film cooling holes distributed over the nozzle pressure surface were optimized by minimizing the peak temperature, temperature deviation. Additional internal cooling components such as pedestals and rectangular rib turbulators were modeled inside the cooling passages for more efficient heat transfer. The real engine conditions were given for boundary conditions to fluid and solid domains for conjugate heat transfer analysis. Hot combustion gas properties such as specific heat at constant pressure and other transport properties were given as functions of temperature. Also, the conductivity of Inconel 718 was also given as a function of temperature to solve the heat equation in the nozzle solid domain. Conjugate heat transfer analysis results showed that optimized designs showed better cooling performance, especially on the pressure surface due to proper staggering and spacing hole-rows compared to the baseline design. The overall cooling performances were offset from the adiabatic film cooling effectiveness. Locally concentrated heat transfer and corresponding high cooling effectiveness region appeared where internal cooling effects were overlapped in the optimized designs. Also, conjugate heat transfer analysis results for the optimized designs showed more uniform contours of the overall cooling effectiveness compared to the baseline design. By varying the coolant mass flow rate, it was observed that pressure surface was more sensitive to the coolant mass flow rate than nozzle leading edge stagnation region and suction surface. The CHT results showed that optimized designs to improve the adiabatic film cooling effectiveness also have better overall cooling effectiveness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Hongyan Bu ◽  
Yufeng Yang ◽  
Liming Song ◽  
Jun Li

Abstract The gas turbine endwall is bearing extreme thermal loads with the rapid increase of turbine inlet temperature. Therefore, the effective cooling of turbine endwalls is of vital importance for the safe operation of turbines. In the design of endwall cooling layouts, numerical simulations based on conjugate heat transfer (CHT) are drawing more attention as the component temperature can be predicted directly. However, the computation cost of high-fidelity CHT analysis can be high and even prohibitive especially when there are many cases to evaluate such as in the design optimization of cooling layout. In this study, we established a multi-fidelity framework in which the data of low-fidelity CHT analysis was incorporated to help the building of a model that predicts the result of high-fidelity simulation. Based upon this framework, multi-fidelity design optimization of a validated numerical turbine endwall model was carried out. The high and low fidelity data were obtained from the computation of fine mesh and coarse mesh respectively. In the optimization, the positions of the film cooling holes were parameterized and controlled by a shape function. With the help of multi-fidelity modeling and sequentially evaluated designs, the cooling performance of the model endwall was improved efficiently.


Author(s):  
Weiguo Ai ◽  
Thomas H. Fletcher

Numerical computations were conducted to simulate flyash deposition experiments on gas turbine disk samples with internal impingement and film cooling using a CFD code (FLUENT). The standard k-ω turbulence model and RANS were employed to compute the flow field and heat transfer. The boundary conditions were specified to be in agreement with the conditions measured in experiments performed in the BYU Turbine Accelerated Deposition Facility (TADF). A Lagrangian particle method was utilized to predict the ash particulate deposition. User-defined subroutines were linked with FLUENT to build the deposition model. The model includes particle sticking/rebounding and particle detachment, which are applied to the interaction of particles with the impinged wall surface to describe the particle behavior. Conjugate heat transfer calculations were performed to determine the temperature distribution and heat transfer coefficient in the region close to the film-cooling hole and in the regions further downstream of a row of film-cooling holes. Computational and experimental results were compared to understand the effect of film hole spacing, hole size and TBC on surface heat transfer. Calculated capture efficiencies compare well with experimental results.


Author(s):  
Duccio Griffini ◽  
Massimiliano Insinna ◽  
Simone Salvadori ◽  
Francesco Martelli

A high-pressure vane equipped with a realistic film-cooling configuration has been studied. The vane is characterized by the presence of multiple rows of fan-shaped holes along pressure and suction side while the leading edge is protected by a showerhead system of cylindrical holes. Steady three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations have been performed. A preliminary grid sensitivity analysis with uniform inlet flow has been used to quantify the effect of spatial discretization. Turbulence model has been assessed in comparison with available experimental data. The effects of the relative alignment between combustion chamber and high-pressure vanes are then investigated considering realistic inflow conditions in terms of hot spot and swirl. The inlet profiles used are derived from the EU-funded project TATEF2. Two different clocking positions are considered: the first one where hot spot and swirl core are aligned with passage and the second one where they are aligned with the leading edge. Comparisons between metal temperature distributions obtained from conjugate heat transfer simulations are performed evidencing the role of swirl in determining both the hot streak trajectory within the passage and the coolant redistribution. The leading edge aligned configuration is resulted to be the most problematic in terms of thermal load, leading to increased average and local vane temperature peaks on both suction side and pressure side with respect to the passage aligned case. A strong sensitivity of both injected coolant mass flow and heat removed by heat sink effect has also been highlighted for the showerhead cooling system.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyan Bu ◽  
Yufeng Yang ◽  
Liming Song ◽  
Jun Li

Abstract The gas turbine endwall is bearing extreme thermal loads with the rapid increase of turbine inlet temperature. Therefore, the effective cooling of turbine endwalls is of vital importance for the safe operation of turbines. In the design of endwall cooling layouts, numerical simulations based on conjugate heat transfer (CHT) are drawing more attention as the component temperature can be predicted directly. However, the computation cost of high-fidelity CHT analysis can be high and even prohibitive especially when there are many cases to evaluate such as in the design optimization of cooling layout. In this study, we established a multi-fidelity framework in which the data of low-fidelity CHT analysis was incorporated to help the building of a model that predicts the result of high-fidelity simulation. Based upon this framework, multi-fidelity design optimization of a validated numerical turbine endwall model was carried out. The high and low fidelity data were obtained from the computation of fine mesh and coarse mesh respectively. In the optimization, the positions of the film cooling holes were parameterized and controlled by a shape function. With the help of multi-fidelity modeling and sequentially evaluated designs, the cooling performance of the model endwall was improved efficiently.


2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaochen Lu ◽  
Peixue Jiang ◽  
Hideaki Sugishita ◽  
Hideyuki Uechi ◽  
Kiyoshi Suenaga

Author(s):  
Ron-Ho Ni ◽  
William Humber ◽  
George Fan ◽  
John P. Clark ◽  
Richard J. Anthony ◽  
...  

Conjugate heat transfer analysis was conducted on a 648 hole film cooled turbine vane using Code Leo and compared to experimental results obtained at the Air Force Research Laboratory Turbine Research Facility. An unstructured mesh with fully resolved film holes for both fluid and solid domains was used to conduct the conjugate heat transfer simulation on a desktop PC with eight cores. Initial heat flux and surface metal temperature predictions showed reasonable agreement with heat flux measurements but under prediction of surface metal temperature values. Root cause analysis was performed, leading to two refinements. First, a thermal barrier coating layer was introduced into the analysis to account for the insulating properties of the Kapton layer used for the heat flux gauges. Second, inlet boundary conditions were updated to more accurately reflect rig measurement conditions. The resulting surface metal temperature predictions showed excellent agreement relative to measured results (+/− 5 degrees K).


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