High Resolution Heat Transfer Measurement Technique on Contoured Endwall With Non-Uniform Thermal Resistance

Author(s):  
Benoit Laveau ◽  
Reza S. Abhari ◽  
Michael E. Crawford ◽  
Ewald Lutum

The introduction of endwall contouring in the design of modern gas turbines has helped to improve the aerodynamic performance. In fact, the management of secondary flows and the control of purge air flow are limiting the generation of losses and enhancing the use of coolant air. The impact of such geometrical features on the endwall thermal loads is then of primary interest for designers in charge of optimizing the cooling of the components and ensuring their mechanical integrity. This paper focuses on heat transfer measurement on a contoured vane endwall installed in an axial turbine. The measurements were performed on a dedicated platform installed in the axial turbine rig of ETH Zurich, using a quasi-isothermal boundary condition and an infrared camera traversed by a multi-axis robot-arm. Due to the complex geometry, a mis-attachment of the insulating Kapton layer was observed in several regions of the passage and corrupted the measurements of about 20% of the endwall. An experimental correction method based on the surface response to laser step heating was developed. A specific setup was constructed and used to map the surface response of a calibration plate with flat bottom holes and the heat transfer platform. A model linking the response to the bubble thickness was obtained and used to successfully correct the results. The heat transfer data were obtained for two turbine operating conditions at ReCax = 720000 and 520000. The correction technique, commonly used for defects detection, has been applied in a quantitative manner to provide successful correction of the measurements for different operating conditions.

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. F29ZWY ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastiano Lazzi Gazzini ◽  
Rainer Schädler ◽  
Anestis I. Kalfas ◽  
Reza S. Abhari ◽  
Sebastian Hohenstein ◽  
...  

AbstractIn order to gain in cycle efficiency, turbine inlet temperatures tend to rise, posing the challenge for designers to cool components more effectively. Purge flow injection through the rim seal is regularly used in gas turbines to limit the ingestion of hot air in the cavities and prevent overheating of the disks and shaft bearings. The interaction of the purge air with the main flow and the static pressure field of the blade rows results in a non-homogenous distribution of coolant on the passage endwall which poses questions on its effect on endwall heat transfer. A novel measurement technique based on infrared thermography has been applied in the rotating axial turbine research facility LISA of the Laboratory for Energy Conversion (LEC) of ETH Zürich. A 1.5 stage configuration with fully three-dimensional airfoils and endwall contouring is integrated in the facility. The effect of different purge air mass flow rates on the distribution of the heat transfer quantities has been observed for the rated operating condition of the turbine. Two-dimensional distributions of Nusselt number and adiabatic wall temperature show that the purge flow affects local heat loads. It does so by acting on the adiabatic wall temperature on the suction side of the passage until 30% of the axial extent of the rotor endwall. This suggests the possibility of effectively employing purge air also as rotor platform coolant in this specific region. The strengthening of the secondary flows due to purge air injection is observed, but plays a negligible role in varying local heat fluxes. For one test case, experimental data is compared to high-fidelity, unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes simulations performed on a model of the full 1.5 stage configuration.


Author(s):  
M. Cochet ◽  
W. Colban ◽  
M. Gritsch ◽  
S. Naik ◽  
M. Schnieder

Low emission requirements for heavy-duty gas turbines can be achieved with flat combustor temperature profiles, reducing the combustor peak temperature. As a result, the heat load on the first stage heat shield above the first stage blade increases. High lift airfoils cause increased thermal loading on the heat shield above the blade tip and impact the unavoidable secondary flows, including complex vortex flows. Cascade tests have been performed on a blade with a generic high lift profile and the results on the heat shield are presented. A transient thermochromic liquid crystal measurement technique was used to obtain heat transfer coefficients on the heat shield surface. Several variations of blade tip clearance were investigated, and the impact on heat transfer coefficients is shown. Computational fluid dynamics predictions are compared to the experimental data to interpret the data and validate the CFD.


Author(s):  
Joerg Krueckels ◽  
William Colban ◽  
Michael Gritsch ◽  
Martin Schnieder

Low emission requirements for large industrial gas turbines can be achieved with flat combustor temperature profiles reducing the combustor peak temperature. As a result the heat load on the first stage vane platforms increases and platform film cooling is an important requirement. Furthermore, high lift airfoils generate stronger secondary flows including complex vortex flows over the platforms, which impacts heat transfer coefficients and film cooling. Cascade tests have been performed on a high lift profile with a platform film configuration and will be presented. The linear cascade was operated at engine representative Mach numbers. Pressure measurements are compared to design data to ensure correct operating conditions and periodicity of the cascade. The thermochromic liquid crystal measurement technique is used to obtain adiabatic film cooling effectiveness. The upstream gap (corresponding to the gap between the combustor and turbine) and the purge air exiting this gap are included in the investigations. The effect of the purge air on the recovery temperature is very strong and needs to be taken into account for the layout of the cooling scheme. The heat transfer coefficient distribution on the platform is obtained for an uncooled configuration using a transient infrared imaging technique with heat flux reconstruction. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) assessments are used to support the validation results. Heat transfer coefficients and the effect of the purge air on adiabatic wall temperatures are compared with experimental results.


Author(s):  
S. Eshati ◽  
M. F. Abdul Ghafir ◽  
P. Laskaridis ◽  
Y. G. Li

This paper investigates the relationship between design parameters and creep life consumption of stationary gas turbines using a physics based life model. A representative thermodynamic performance model is used to simulate engine performance. The output from the performance model is used as an input to the physics based model. The model consists of blade sizing model which sizes the HPT blade using the constant nozzle method, mechanical stress model which performs the stress analysis, thermal model which performs thermal analysis by considering the radial distribution of gas temperature, and creep model which using the Larson-miller parameter to calculate the lowest blade creep life. The effect of different parameters including radial temperature distortion factor (RTDF), material properties, cooling effectiveness and turbine entry temperatures (TET) is investigated. The results show that different design parameter combined with a change in operating conditions can significantly affect the creep life of the HPT blade and the location along the span of the blade where the failure could occur. Using lower RTDF the lowest creep life is located at the lower section of the span, whereas at higher RTDF the lowest creep life is located at the upper side of the span. It also shows that at different cooling effectiveness and TET for both materials the lowest blade creep life is located between the mid and the tip of the span. The physics based model was found to be simple and useful tool to investigate the impact of the above parameters on creep life.


Author(s):  
Riccardo Da Soghe ◽  
Cosimo Bianchini ◽  
Jacopo D’Errico

This paper deals with a numerical study aimed at the validation of a computational procedure for the aerothermal characterization of pre-swirl systems employed in axial gas turbines. The numerical campaign focused on an experimental facility which models the flow field inside a direct-flow pre-swirl system. Steady and unsteady simulation techniques were adopted in conjunction with both a standard two-equations RANS/URANS modelling and more advanced approaches such as the Scale-Adaptive-Simulation principle, the SBES and LES. The comparisons between CFD and experiments were done in terms of swirl number development, static and total pressure distributions, receiving holes discharge coefficient and heat transfer on the rotor disc surface. Several operating conditions were accounted for, spanning 0.78·106<Reφ<1.21·106 and 0.123<λt<0.376. Overall the steady-state CFD predictions are in good agreement with the experimental evidences even though it is not able to confidently mimic the experimental swirl and pressure behaviour in some regions. Although the use of unsteady sliding mesh and direct turbulence modelling, would in principle increase the insight in the physical phenomenon, from a design perspective the tradeoff between accuracy and computational costs is not always favourable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2039 (1) ◽  
pp. 012001
Author(s):  
P D Alekseev ◽  
Yu L Leukhin

Abstract A study of the aerodynamics and heat transfer of a jet modular recuperator with a change in its geometric characteristics has been carried out. The influence of the in-line and staggered arrangement of the blowing holes, as well as the diameter of the perforated pipe is considered. In all considered variants, the number of holes, their diameter and gas flow rate through the recuperator remained unchanged. Numerical modeling of the problem was carried out in a three-dimensional setting using the ANSYS Fluent 15.0 software package. It was found that with the in-line arrangement of the blowing holes, secondary flows are formed between their longitudinal rows in the form of swirling jets of opposite rotation directed towards the outlet section of the recuperative device, through which the main part of the heated air flows out. With the staggered arrangement of the blowing holes, the formation of spiral vortices is disturbed, the air flow is carried out along the entire cross section of the annular channel, increasing the drift effect of the flow on the impact jets, which leads to a decrease in the intensity of heat transfer and its uniformity along the length of the working surface. An increase in the diameter of the inner perforated pipe leads to a decrease in the drift effect of the cocurrent flow on the jets, an increase in the distribution uniformity of the heat flux along the length of the heat transfer surface, and an increase in the heat transfer coefficient.


Author(s):  
Jacob E. Rivera ◽  
Robert L. Gordon ◽  
Mohsen Talei ◽  
Gilles Bourque

Abstract This paper reports on an optimisation study of the CO turndown behaviour of an axially staged combustor, in the context of industrial gas turbines (GT). The aim of this work is to assess the optimally achievable CO turndown behaviour limit given system and operating characteristics, without considering flow-induced behaviours such as mixing quality and flame spatial characteristics. To that end, chemical reactor network modelling is used to investigate the impact of various system and operating conditions on the exhaust CO emissions of each combustion stage, as well as at the combustor exit. Different combustor residence time combinations are explored to determine their contribution to the exhaust CO emissions. The two-stage combustor modelled in this study consists of a primary (Py) and a secondary (Sy) combustion stage, followed by a discharge nozzle (DN), which distributes the exhaust to the turbines. The Py is modelled using a freely propagating flame (FPF), with the exhaust gas extracted downstream of the flame front at a specific location corresponding to a specified residence time (tr). These exhaust gases are then mixed and combusted with fresh gases in the Sy, modelled by a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) operating within a set tr. These combined gases then flow into the DN, which is modelled by a plug flow reactor (PFR) that cools the gas to varying combustor exit temperatures within a constrained tr. Together, these form a simplified CRN model of a two-stage, dry-low emissions (DLE) combustion system. Using this CRN model, the impact of the tr distribution between the Py, Sy and DN is explored. A parametric study is conducted to determine how inlet pressure (Pin), inlet temperature (Tin), equivalence ratio (ϕ) and Py-Sy fuel split (FS), individually impact indicative CO turndown behaviour. Their coupling throughout engine load is then investigated using a model combustor, and its effect on CO turndown is explored. Thus, this aims to deduce the fundamental, chemically-driven parameters considered to be most important for identifying the optimal CO turndown of GT combustors. In this work, a parametric study and a model combustor study are presented. The parametric study consists of changing a single parameter at a time, to observe the independent effect of this change and determine its contribution to CO turndown behaviour. The model combustor study uses the same CRN, and varies the parameters simultaneously to mimic their change as an engine moves through its steady-state power curve. The latter study thus elucidates the difference in CO turndown behaviour when all operating conditions are coupled, as they are in practical engines. The results of this study aim to demonstrate the parameters that are key for optimising and improving CO turndown.


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