An Integrated Approach to Simulate Gas Turbine Secondary Air System

Author(s):  
Ali Izadi ◽  
Seyed Hossein Madani ◽  
Seyed Vahid Hosseini ◽  
Mahmoud Chizari

Abstract One of the most critical parts of a modern gas turbine that its reliability and performance has a great influence on cycle efficiency is the secondary air system (SAS). Modern systems functions to supply not only cooling air flow for turbine blades and vanes but sealing flow for bearing chambers and turbine segments as well as turbine disks’ purge flow in order to eliminate hot gas ingestion. Due to the various interactions between SAS and main gas, consideration of the former is substantially crucial in design and analysis of the whole engine. Geometrical complexities and centrifugal effects of rotating blades and disks, however, make the flow field and heat transfer of the problem so complicated AND too computationally costly to be simulated utilizing full 3-D CFD methods. Therefore, developing 1-D and 0-D tools applying network methods are of great interests. The present article describes a modular SAS analysis tool that is consisted of a network of elements and nodes. Each flow branch of a whole engine SAS network is substituted with an element and then, various branches (elements) intersect with each other just at their end nodes. These elements which might include some typical components such as labyrinth seals, orifices, stationary/rotating pipes, pre-swirls, and rim-seals, are generally articulated with characteristic curves that are extracted from high fidelity CFD modeling using commercial software such as Flowmaster or ANSYS-CFX. Having these curves, an algorithm is developed to calculate flow parameters at nodes with the aid of iterative methods. The procedure is based on three main innovative ideas. The first one is related to the network construction by defining a connectivity matrix which could be applied to any arbitrary network such as hydraulic or lubrication networks. In the second one, off-design SAS calculation will be proposed by introducing some SAS elements that their characteristic non-dimensional curves are influenced by their inlet total pressure. The last novelty is the integration of the blades coolant calculation process that incorporates external heat transfer calculation, structural conduction and coolant side modeling with SAS network simulation. Finally, SAS simulation of an industrial gas turbine is presented to illustrate capabilities of the presented tool in design point and off-design conditions.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Izadi ◽  
Seyed Vahid Hosseini ◽  
Seyed Hossein Madani ◽  
Mahmoud Chizari

Author(s):  
David Hunt ◽  
Youming Yuan

Abstract This paper presents a novel approach that couples system modelling of both the thermo-fluid system and the thermal solid system by modelling conjugate heat transfer within a single 1D system analysis solver and applies it to the Secondary Air System of a Gas Turbine. The Secondary Air System design has to balance minimizing engine bleed whilst ensuring sufficient cooling. To achieve this, designers model both the secondary air flow and the temperature distribution in solid components. System CFD tools like Simcenter Flomaster may be used to solve flow, pressure and temperature distributions and a 3D thermal solver used to perform the thermal analysis of the blade and disc solids. The thermal interaction between the secondary flow system and the solid components is a key part of the model and is known as conjugate heat transfer analysis (CHT). This approach is problematic early in the design cycle when detailed or stable geometry information may not be available for the 3D thermal tool. An approach that couples the modelling of both the thermo-fluid system and the thermal solid system within a single 1D/system analysis tool offers the advantage of faster modelling and consistent model accuracy of both fluid and solid components, especially in the early concept design stage. This 1D-CHT approach has been implemented within Simcenter Flomaster and validated using an idealized analytical solution. It is shown that the model can be applied to the analysis of gas turbine secondary air systems including cavity flows and thermal analysis of the rotor and stator discs that form the thermal boundary of these cavities using Simcenter Flomaster alone.


Author(s):  
D. Brillert ◽  
F.-K. Benra ◽  
H. J. Dohmen ◽  
O. Schneider

The cooling air in the secondary air system of gas turbines is routed through the inside of the rotor shaft. The air enters the rotor through an internal extraction in the compressor section and flows through different components to the turbine blades. Constant improvements of the secondary air system is a basic element to increase efficiency and power of heavy duty gas turbines. It is becoming more and more important to have a precise calculation of the heat transfer and air temperature in the internal cooling air system. This influences the cooling behavior, the material temperature and consequently the cooling efficiency. The material temperature influences the stresses and the creep behavior which is important for the life time prediction and the reliability of the components of the engine. Furthermore, the material temperature influences the clearances and again the cooling flow, e.g. the amount of mass flow rate, hot gas ingestion etc. This paper deals with an investigation of the influence of heat transfer on the internal cooling air system and on the material temperature. It shows a comparison between numerical calculations with and without heat transfer. Firstly, the Navier-Stokes CFD calculation shows the cooling flow physics of different parts of the secondary air system passages with solid heat transfer. In the second approach, the study is expanded to consider the cooling flow physics under conditions without heat transfer. On the basis of these investigations, the paper shows a comparison between the flow with and without heat transfer. The results of the simulation with heat transfer show a negligible influence on the cooling flow temperature and a stronger influence on the material temperature. The results of the calculations are compared with measured data. The influence on the material temperature is verified with measured material temperatures from a Siemens Model V84.3A gas turbine prototype.


Author(s):  
C. Bianchini ◽  
R. Da Soghe ◽  
B. Facchini ◽  
L. Innocenti ◽  
M. Micio ◽  
...  

In high performance heavy-duty engines, turbine inlet temperature is considerably higher than the melting point of the metals used for turbine components e.g. nozzle guide vanes, turbine rotor blades, platforms and discs, etc. Cooling of those components is therefore essential and is achieved by diverting a few percent of the compressed air from extraction points in the compressor and passing it to the turbine through stationary ducts and over rotating shafts and discs. All those elements form the so-called secondary air system of the gas turbine, whose correct design is hence fundamental for safety, reliability and performance of the engine. Secondary air system analysis is generally performed using one dimensional calculation procedures, based correlations both for pressure losses and heat transfer coefficient evaluations. Such calculation approach, usually used in industry, takes advantages in terms of reduced computational resources. Besides, for those elements of air systems where multidimensional flow effects are not negligible and the flow field structure is highly complex, the one-dimensional–correlative modeling needs to be supported by CFD investigations. Among these elements, rotating cavities need a careful modeling in order to correctly estimate discs temperature and the minimum amount of purge air to prevent hot gas ingestion. Ansaldo Energia is facing the investigation of secondary air system of Vx4.3A gas turbine models also by using numerical tools developed by Dipartimento di Energetica “Sergio Stecco” of University of Florence. They include both a one-dimensional cavity solver and a 3D unstructured finite volume code of compressible Navier-Stokes Equation based on open source C++ Open-Foam libraries for continuum mechanics. The first numerical tool has been widely employed in simplified analysis of stator-rotor cavities and is undergoing to be integrated into a in-house lumped-parameters fluid network solver simulating the entire secondary air system. This paper is aimed at discussing some interesting results from numerical tests performed with the above discussed programs on stator-rotor cavities of a V94.3A2 gas turbine. Such numerical analysis was addressed both for better understanding the flow phenomena in the wheel space regions and for testing and verifying the experimental correlations and the calculation procedure implemented in the one-dimensional program. A detailed comparative analysis between the two different codes will be shown, both in adiabatic and heat transfer conditions.


Author(s):  
Sohail Alizadeh ◽  
Naveen Gopinathrao

The compressor is a particularly sensitive component in a gas turbine engine. Variations from design geometry or operating conditions can have detrimental effects on performance, efficiency and compressor life. In this work the propagation of secondary air system operational uncertainty sources on a rotor-stator cavity at the front of a large turbofan IPC are assessed. The calculations are carried through from appropriate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses, characterising the flow and heat transfer in the cavity adjacent to an IP1 disc, to the FE Thermo-mechanical calculations. The application provides an example demonstration how uncertainty quantification may be undertaken for compressor analysis involving intensive CFD computations. The non-deterministic solution provides probabilistic definitions for disc temperatures and blade tip clearances, as key parameters in the design of the component. Whilst CFD has found increasing use in gas turbine air system R&D and design applications, resource requirement has almost always limited its use to deterministic single-input single-output cases. Here, by employing efficient uncertainty quantification based on Polynomial Chaos Methodologies to CFD, the air mass flow and temperature feed to the cavity are treated as operational uncertainty sources. Both single variable and multi-variable sources are considered. The CFD-FE link is established through a Temperature Influence Coefficient methodology and in propagating and managing the uncertainties through both analyses, means and standard deviations in the key design parameters are derived. The value of such a methodology in contrast to deterministic calculations is discussed from the view point of the designer with reference to component temperatures and thermal growths.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davendu Y. Kulkarni ◽  
Luca di Mare

Abstract The design and analysis of the secondary air system (SAS) of gas turbine engine is a complex and time-consuming process because of its complicated geometry topology. The conventional SAS design-analysis model generation process is quite tedious, time consuming. It is still heavily dependent on human expertise and thus incurs high time-cost. This paper presents an automated, whole-engine SAS flow network model generation methodology. During the SAS preprocessing step, the method accesses a pre-built whole-engine geometry model created using a novel, in-house, feature-based geometry modelling environment. It then transforms the engine geometry features into the features suitable for SAS flow network analysis. The proposed method not only extracts the geometric information from the computational geometry but also retrieves additional non-geometric attributes such as, rotational frames, boundary types, materials and boundary conditions etc. Apart from ensuring geometric consistency, this methodology also establishes a bi-directional information exchange protocol between engine geometry model and SAS flow network model, which enables making engine geometry modifications based on SAS analysis results. The application of this feature mapping methodology is demonstrated by generating the secondary air system (SAS) flow network model of a modern three-shaft gas turbine engine. This capability is particularly useful for the integration of geometry modeler with the simulation framework. The present SAS model is generated within a few minutes, without any human intervention, which significantly reduces the SAS design-analysis time-cost. The proposed method allows performing a large number of whole-engine SAS simulations, design optimisations and fast re-design activities.


Author(s):  
Oguz Uzol ◽  
Cengiz Camci

A new concept for enhanced turbulent transport of heat in internal coolant passages of gas turbine blades is introduced. The new heat transfer augmentation component called “oscillator fin” is based on an unsteady flow system using the interaction of multiple unsteady jets and wakes generated downstream of a fluidic oscillator. Incompressible, unsteady and two dimensional solutions of Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations are obtained both for an oscillator fin and for an equivalent cylindrical pin fin and the results are compared. Preliminary results show that a significant increase in the turbulent kinetic energy level occur in the wake region of the oscillator fin with respect to the cylinder with similar level of aerodynamic penalty. The new concept does not require additional components or power to sustain its oscillations and its manufacturing is as easy as a conventional pin fin. The present study makes use of an unsteady numerical simulation of mass, momentum, turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation rate conservation equations for flow visualization downstream of the new oscillator fin and an equivalent cylinder. Relative enhancements of turbulent kinetic energy and comparisons of the total pressure field from transient simulations qualitatively suggest that the oscillator fin has excellent potential in enhancing local heat transfer in internal cooling passages without significant aerodynamic penalty.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 115038
Author(s):  
Theoklis Nikolaidis ◽  
Haonan Wang ◽  
Panagiotis Laskaridis

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