Conjugate Heat Transfer Calculations on GT Rotor Blade for Industrial Applications: Part I—Equivalent Internal Fluid Network Setup and Procedure Description

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 of a conjugate heat transfer 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 first part of this work is focused on the description of the procedures in terms of set up of the equivalent fluid network model of internal cooling system and its tuning through experimental measurements of blade flow function. A first computation of blade metal temperature was obtained by coupling with CFD computations carried out on a de-featured geometry of the blade. Achieved results are compared with the data of a metallographic analysis performed on a blade operated on an actual engine. Some discrepancies are observed between datasets, suggesting the necessity to improve the models, mainly from the CFD side.

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

“…In this way, the analysis parameter in CAE is reinterpreted with knowledge of CAD and geometry, which is closely related to CAD operations, and easier to be processed by computers. Geometric primitive recognition/construction aims to obtain the geometry primitives in equation (12). The key of geometry primitive recognition/construction is to identify specified faces, loops, edges, and vertexes through the rule-basedrecognition method, and then construct some other primitives based on the existed geometry primitives.…”

“…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.…”

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

“…Combining Equations ( 5) and ( 6) to eliminate a(x), η(x, z) cylindrical is written as Equation (7),…”

“…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.…”

Network analysis of a coolant flow performance for the combined impingement and film cooled first-stage of high pressure gas turbine nozzle guide vane

“…Bonini et al 9 presented an in-house developed solver that uses a network method for analysing conjugate heat transfer calculations on gas turbine rotor blade for industrial applications. In this method, using assumed wall temperature, internal flow and heat transfer were calculated and validated with the experimental data that include temperature distribution of blade coolant-side walls.…”