Thermal-Fluid–Solid Coupling—Parametrical Numerical Analysis of Hot Turbine Nozzle Guide Vane

Abstract

The cooling technology of hot turbine components has been a subject of continuous improvement for decades. In high-pressure turbine blades, the regions most affected by the excessive corrosion are the leading and trailing edges. In addition, high Kt regions at the hot gas path are exposed to cracking due to the low and high cycle fatigue failure modes. Especially in the case of a nozzle guide vane, the ability to predict thermally driven loads is crucial to assess its life and robustness. The difficulties in measuring thermal properties in hot conditions considerably limit the number of experimental results available in the literature. One of the most popular test cases is a NASA C3X vane, but coolant temperature is not explicitly revealed in the test report. As a result of that, numerous scientific works validated against that vane are potentially inconsistent. To address that ambiguity, the presented work was performed on a fully structural and a very fine mesh assuming room inlet temperature on every cooling channel. Special attention was paid to the options of the k−ω SST (shear-stress transport) viscosity model, such as Viscous heating (VH), Curvature correction (CC), Production Kato-Launder (KT), and Production limiter (PL). The strongest impact was from the Viscous heating, as it increases local vane temperature by as much as 40 deg. The significance of turbulent Prandtl number impact was also investigated. The default option used in the commercial CFD code is set to 0.85. Presented study modifies that value using equations proposed by Wassel/Catton and Kays/Crawford. Additionally, the comparison between four, two, and one-equation viscosity models was performed.