EFFECT OF GAS PIPE FLOW DIRECTION ON A PASSIVE SUBSEA COOLER EFFECTIVENESS: RESULTS OF 3D CONJUGATE HEAT TRANSFER SIMULATION

Abstract Double wall cooling, consisting of internal impingement cooling and external film cooling, is an advanced cooling method of gas turbines. In this paper, the flow and conjugate heat transfer characteristics of double wall cooling which has a film plate with gradient thickness are analyzed numerically. The detailed overall cooling effectiveness distributions are obtained by solving steady three dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. In the double wall cooling scheme, seven vertical film holes and six impingement holes are staggered with same diameter (D), and the hole pitch of them are both set to 6D in flow direction and lateral direction. The gradient thickness along the flow direction is realized by setting the angle (α) between the lower surface of the film plate and the horizontal plane at −1.5 deg and 1.5 deg respectively. By comparing the results of four broadly used turbulence models with experimental data, SST k-ω is selected as the optimal turbulence model for double wall cooling analysis in this paper. In addition, the number of grids are finally determined to be 5.2 million by grid sensitivity calculation. The influence of the thickness gradient on the overall cooling effectiveness is revealed by comparing with the constant thickness film plate (Baseline 1 and 2), and all the cases are performed under four various coolant mass flow rates, which correspond to blowing ratios ranging from 0.25 to 1.5. The calculated results show that the thickening of the film plate downstream is beneficial to improve overall cooling effectiveness at low blowing ratio, which is benefit from two aspects. One is the thicken film plate weakens the flow separation in film hole and velocity of film hole outlet, another is the thicken film plate makes the impingement channels convergence, and impingement cooling is strengthened to some extent. However, with the increase of blowing ratio, the increasing trend gradually weakens due to the jet-off and limited impinge ability. For thickening film plate, the variations of the double wall cooling configurations are considered at initial film plate thickness tf of 2D and 3D, it is found that the ability to improve the overall cooling effectiveness by thickening the film plate downstream decrease as the initial film plate thickness increases, which is due to the increase of heat transfer resistance, and another finding is the cooling effectiveness of downstream thickening film plate with initial thickness of 2D is higher than that of 3D, which will provide a theoretical foundation both for improving cooling performance and reducing turbine blade weight at the same time. The influence of initial impingement gap H is also observed, and the study come to the fact that the best cooling performance occurred in H = 2D.

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Optimized Multi-Floor Throughflow Micro Heat Exchangers

Volume 8C: Heat Transfer and Thermal Engineering ◽

10.1115/imece2013-63590 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Abas Abdoli ◽

George S. Dulikravich

Keyword(s):

Heat Transfer ◽

Conjugate Heat Transfer ◽

Stokes Equations ◽

Flow Direction ◽

Computing Time ◽

Heat Transfer Analysis ◽

Maximum Temperature ◽

Fluid Analysis ◽

Response Surface Approximations ◽

Hot Surface

Multi-floor networks of straight-through liquid cooled microchannels have been investigated by performing conjugate heat transfer in a silicon substrate of size 15×15×1 mm. Two-floor and three-floor cooling configurations were analyzed with different numbers of microchannels on each floor, different diameters of the channels, and different clustering among the floors. Thickness of substrate was calculated based on number of floors, diameter of floors and vertical clustering. Direction of microchannels on each floor changes by 90 degrees from the previous floor. Direction of flow in each microchannel is opposite of the flow direction in its neighbor channels. Conjugate heat transfer analysis was performed by developing a software package which uses quasi-1D thermo-fluid analysis and a 3D steady heat conduction analysis. These two solvers are coupled through their common boundaries representing surfaces of the cooling microchannels. Using quasi-1D solver significantly decreases overall computing time and its results are in good agreement with 3D Navier-Stokes equations solver for these types of application. Multi-objective optimization with modeFRONTIER software was performed using response surface approximations and genetic algorithm. Maximizing total amount of heat removed, minimizing coolant pressure drop, minimizing maximum temperature on the hot surface, and minimizing non-uniformity of temperature on the hot surface were four simultaneous objectives of the optimization. Pareto-optimal solutions demonstrate that thermal loads of 800 W cm−2 can be effectively managed with such multi-floor microchannel cooling networks. Two-floor microchannel configuration was also simulated with 1,000 W cm−2 uniform thermal load and shown to be feasible.

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Development of a Conjugate Heat Transfer Simulation Methodology for Prediction of Steam Turbine Cool-Down Phenomena and Shell Deflection

Volume 5C: Heat Transfer ◽

10.1115/gt2014-25874 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Debabrata Mukhopadhyay ◽

Howard M. Brilliant ◽

Xiaoqing Zheng

Keyword(s):

Heat Transfer ◽

Steam Turbine ◽

Conjugate Heat Transfer ◽

Inlet Temperature ◽

Fe Model ◽

Simulation Methodology ◽

Heat Transfer Simulation ◽

Measured Field ◽

Over The Top ◽

Natural Heat Convection

Shell deflection during shutdown, cool-down process is a phenomenon well known to the steam turbine community. The main reason for this phenomenon is slower cooling of the top half shell and a relative faster cooling of the bottom half shell. There are multiple reasons for such thermal behavior of the two half casings, including natural heat convection from the bottom half to the top half, asymmetrical distribution of mass, dissimilar behavior of thermal insulation over the top and the bottom halves, etc. Shell deflection poses considerable challenge to the clearance engineer in terms of configuring operating clearance which ensures rub free operations. Understanding the cool-down process for the rotor is also equally important as the allowable steam inlet temperature during the hot or warm restart will depend on prevailing local temperature of the rotor. This paper describes an exemplary physics-based cool-down prediction methodology capable of accurately capturing the rotor cool-down process. The methodology involves development of a full 3D rotor casing thermal model, integrated conjugate heat transfer FE model and validated with measured field data.

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