Conjugate Heat Transfer Calculations on GT Rotor Blade for Industrial Applications: Part II—Improvement of External Flow Modeling

Abstract

Gas turbine design has been characterized over the years by a continuous increase of the maximum cycle temperature, justified by a corresponding increase of cycle efficiency and power output. In such way turbine components heat load management has become a compulsory activity and then, a reliable procedure to evaluate the blades and vanes metal temperatures, is, nowadays, a crucial aspect for a safe components design. This two part work presents a three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer procedure developed in the framework of an internal research project of GE Oil & Gas. The procedure, applied to the first rotor blade of the MS5002E gas turbine, consists in a decoupled analysis in which the internal cooling system was modeled by an in-house one dimensional thermo-fluid network solver, the external heat loads and pressure distribution have been evaluated through 3D CFD and the heat conduction in the solid is carried out through a 3D FEM solution. The second part of this work is focused on the improvement of external heat loads prediction through the use of a full featured geometry of the blade. In particular a detailed representation of the rim seal is accounted for as well as the actual geometry of the squealer tip. A new set of conjugate results is compared with temperature obtained by metallographic analysis, pointing out the relevant effect of the actual endwall contour on the metal temperature distribution at low spans of the blade.

Data-Driven Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis of a Gas Turbine Vane

“…η(x) follows the correlation form in Equation (8). Therefore, the final form of η(x, z) cylindrical is Equation (9):…”

“…In order to make the calculation flexible enough for different accuracy and efficiency demands, a decoupled method was developed, which allows applying different analysis methods to solve different domains. Bonini and Andreini [7,8] developed a cooling system simulation tool combining external CFD, internal flow network code, and a finite element conductive model and applied it to the first rotor blade of the MS5002E gas turbine. Temperature profiles from the simulation tool and experiment matched well.…”

A rapid parameter configuration method for film hole component in pipe-net calculation

“…5 In general, most of the research on PNC focuses on the mechanism of flow and thermodynamics, such as the selection of empirical parameters or formulas, 6 the mechanism of new cooling structure components, 7 the design and optimization of model solver, 8 the application of PNC in a design system, 9 etc. [10][11][12] In the turbine blade design system, the PNC is often used for fast verification of cooling structure schemes. 13 For example, Chi 14 proposed a multi-dimensional procedure for cooling design of air-cooled turbine blades, which consists of two levels, a schematic design using one-dimensional (1D) PNC method, and a detailed design based on CFX conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulation.…”

An Acceleration Method for Numerical Studies of Conjugate Heat Transfer With a Self-Adaptive Coupling Time Step Method: Application to a Wall-Impinging Flame

“…The study of conjugate heat transfer (CHT), not necessarily involving combustion, is an active area of research. Using code coupling between separate solvers used for the solid part and the fluid flow have been carried out for RANS simulations [1][2][3][4] and for Large Eddy Simulations (LES) [5][6][7][8][9][10] . When studying turbulent reactive flows, the more and more maturing LES framework offers great accuracy [11] compared to RANS, at the cost of consuming large computational resources.…”