Customer Challenge
With today’s efficient fuel burn and stringent emissions requirements, cooling technology in the turbine has remained at the forefront of gas turbine design challenges. Understanding the physics of film cooling – a key gas turbine technology – allows for overall cooling flow requirements to be optimized for best engine performance.
Scope
- Understand the impact of vane unsteadiness on the downstream blade film cooling effectiveness
- Determine if considering vane passing effects would lead to a more optimized blade cooling configuration layout
Solution
- Multi-airfoil unsteady stage CFD model for simulation
- Fully cooled blades model, with detailed film holes and leading edge internal cooling passage (to capture potential pulsation effects)
- Determined areas of blade that were overcooled and undercooled due to unsteady effects
Feature
Feature
- Verified blade pressure distribution with experimental data
- Advanced modelling techniques employed to reduce simulation duration, while maintaining accuracy
- Documented unsteady effect mechanisms for use in future designs
Benefits
- Assessed the influence of unsteady flow field on turbine blade film cooling
- Modeling of internal passages allowed effects of pressure fluctuations on the cooling flow to be directly simulated
- In-house expertise allowed for development of the simulation approach with minimal customer drag
- In-house expertise with commercial CFD tools and advanced turbomachinery modeling techniques allowed for faster turnaround time