Towards Large Eddy Simulation of Rotating Turbomachinery for Variable Speed Gas Turbine Engine Operation
Abstract In this work, massively parallel wall-modeled Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are conducted to simulate flow through a single stage power turbine sector of a gas-turbine engine under realistic operating conditions. The numerical framework in the current work uses finite volume based compressible CharLES solver that utilizes a moving Voronoi diagram based grid generation. To test grid sensitivity and evaluate the capability of the solver in predicting turbomachinery flows, three grids of varying resolution are used to simulate flow through the baseline gas-turbine under design operating conditions. After assessing the flow solution quality and establishing simulation parameters, LES simulations are conducted to investigate the performance of gas-turbine at off-design conditions. The conditions include the rotor design point at 100% speed, and off-design points at 75%, and 50% speeds subject to high temperatures from the combustor exit flow. The results showed that the internal flow becomes highly unsteady as the rotational speed of rotor deviates from the design point leading to reduced aerodynamic performance. This study demonstrates that the current framework is able to robustly simulate the unsteady flow in a three-dimensional moving rotor environment towards the design of variable speed gas-turbine engines for US Army Future Vertical Lift program.