With the advent of fast computers and availability of less costly memory resources, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as a powerful tool for the design and analysis of flow and heat transfer of high pressure turbine stages. CFD gives an insight in to flow patterns that are difficult, expensive or impossible to study using experimental techniques. However, the application of CFD depends on its accuracy and reliability. This requires the CFD code to be validated with laboratory measurements to ensure its predictive capacity. In the continual effort to improve analysis and design techniques, Honeywell has been investigating in the use of CFD to predict the aerodynamic performance of a high pressure turbine. Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS), unsteady models like detached eddy simulation (DES), large eddy simulation (LES), and Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) are used to predict the aerodynamic performance of a high pressure turbine. Mixing plane approach is used to address the flow data transport across the stationary interface in RANS simulation. The film holes on blade surface and end walls for all the analysis are modeled by using actual film hole modeling technique. The validation is accomplished with the test results of a high pressure turbine, Energy Efficient Engine (E3). The aerodynamic performance data at design point, typical off-design points are taken as test cases for the validation study. One dimensional performance parameters such as corrected mass flow rate, total pressure ratio, cycle efficiency, and two dimensional spanwise distributions of total pressure, total temperature and flow angle that are obtained from CFD results are compared with test data. Streamlines and flow field results at different measurement planes are presented to understand the aerodynamic behavior.

In the continual effort to improve analysis and design techniques, Honeywell is investigating on the use of CFD to predict the aerodynamic performance of a high pressure turbine. The present study has a two fold objective. The first objective is to validate the commercially available CFD codes for aerodynamic performance prediction of a two-stage high pressure turbine at design and off-design points. The other objective is to establish guidelines to help the designer to successfully.set-up and execute the suitable CFD model analysis. The validation to model the stage interfaces is performed with three different types of approaches such as Mixing Plane approach, Frozen Rotor approach and NonLinear Harmonic approach. The film holes on the blade surface, hub and the shroud walls are modeled by using source term cooling and actual film hole modeling techniques for all the analysis. The validation is accomplished with the test results of a two-stage high pressure turbine, Energy Efficient Engine (E3). The aerodynamic performance data at a design point and typical off-design point are taken as test cases for the validation study. One dimensional performance parameters such as corrected mass flow rate, total pressure ratio, cycle efficiency along with two dimensional spanwise distribution of total pressure, total temperature which are obtained from CFD results are compared with test data. Flow field results are presented to understand the aerodynamic behavior.

Impingement cooling offers very high heat transfer coefficients. Flow field, involved in impingement cooling is dominated by stagnation zone, transition zone and developing zone. Understanding of complex flow phenomenon and its effects on heat transfer characteristics is useful for efficient designing of impingement channels. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as a powerful tool for the analysis of flow and heat transfer systems. Honeywell has been investigating the use of CFD to determine the characteristics of various complex turbine blade cooling heat transfer augmentation methods such as impingement. The objective of this study is to develop CFD methodology which is suitable for computational investigation of flow and heat transfer analysis of impingement cooling through validation. Single row of circular jets impinging on concave (curved) surface has been considered for this study. The validation was accomplished with the test results of Bunker and Metzger [10] and with the correlations of Chupp et al. [7]. The parameters which are varied in this study include jet Reynolds number (Re2B = 6750–10200), target plate distance to jet diameter ratio (Z/d = 3 and 4), and target surface sharpness (i.e. radius ratio, r* = 0.2, 0.4 and 1) the simulations are performed under steady state conditions. Predicted results are compared for local endwall heat transfer results along the curve length of the mid span target wall. Flow field results obtained at different locations are presented to understand the heat transfer behavior.

This paper presents a detailed flow and heat transfer characteristic analysis on a gas turbine first stage under hot-streak inlet conditions. Simulations were performed for two locations of hot-streak at turbine inlet with respect to the first stage vane, i.e. i) passage center and ii) blade center. The two kinds of inlet conditions have the same mass-averaged total temperature and total pressure. The passage center hot-streak total pressure and total temperature contours are obtained from the rig data published by Butler. Linear interpolation technique is used to move the hot-streak location from passage center to blade center. The ratio of highest temperature in hot-streak to free stream temperature is 2.0. Mixing plane (MP) and Non-linear harmonic (NLH) approaches are used to address the data transport across the rotor-stator station interface. The numerical solution is validated with the test data obtained from the published rig tests. NLH approach predicted the rotor blade surface temperature distributions close to rig data with a percentage deviation of 3%. The change in hot-streak circumferential position from blade center to passage center lead to decreased attenuation of hot-streak due to pronounced cross momentum transport of fluid across the viscous layers. Turbine flow with blade center hot-streak experiences transient periodic fluctuation of heat load on rotor surface. High temperature gradients are observed at turbine exit station with passage center hot-streak.

The knowledge of heat loads on the turbine is of great interest to turbine designers. Turbulence intensity and stator-rotor axial gap plays a key role in affecting the heat loads. Flow field and associated heat transfer characteristics in turbines are complex and unsteady. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing these complex flow systems. Honeywell has been exploring the use of CFD tools for analysis of flow and heat transfer characteristics of various gas turbine components. The current study has two objectives. The first objective aims at development of CFD methodology by validation. The commercially available CFD code Fine/Turbo is used to validate the predicted results against the benchmark experimental data. Predicted results of pressure coefficient and Stanton number distributions are compared with available experimental data of Dring et al. [1]. The second objective is to investigate the influence of turbulence (0.5% and 10% Tu) and axial gaps (15% and 65% of axial chord) on flow and heat transfer characteristics. Simulations are carried out using both steady state and harmonic models. Turbulence intensity has shown a strong influence on turbine blade heat transfer near the stagnation region, transition and when the turbulent boundary layer is presented. Results show that a mixing plane is not able to capture the flow unsteady features for a small axial gap. Relatively close agreement is obtained with the harmonic model in these situations. Contours of pressure and temperature on the blade surface are presented to understand the behavior of the flow field across the interface.