Current design tools for gas turbine engines invoke a variety of simplifying assumptions to estimate heat transfer to solid/metal engine components (e.g., isothermal boundary conditions). These approximations are often not valid, result in inaccurate predictions of heat transfer, and ultimately compromise the thermal integrity of propulsion and power systems. Wall-modeled large eddy simulation (WMLES) has been recently used to predict heat transfer rates in a variety of relevant flow environments, including separated flows and reactive effusion cooling. Despite these advances, WMLES often does not include conjugate heat conduction in the solid materials due to added computational cost and temporal stiffness from the vast timescale separation between the flow, combustion, and solid-side conduction. In this proposal, Cascade Technologies and The Pennsylvania State University present a plan to build efficient computational tools to predict conjugate heat transfer using WMLES on massively parallel computers. The proposed algorithms will be validated against a battery of cases relevant to turbine blades and effusion cooling, with comparison to detailed experimental data and state-of-the-art RANS simulations. The team will additionally supplement existing experimental databases to advance understanding of conjugate heat transfer in the broader gas turbine community.
Benefit: The work in this proposal is directly aligned with DOD and DON programs, including a request for improved simulation and modeling capabilities from NAVAIR. Current CFD models are not able to accurately predict flow and heat transfer in the hot section of gas turbine engines nor characterize the thermal durability of critical engine components. In addition to filling this specific need, the tools developed under this project are nearly universal and have widespread relevance to more generalized applications in heat transfer and thermal engineering. Many design engineers will choose to replace a fraction of their current lower-fidelity thermal analyses for the richer information available from large-scale simulations of conjugate heat transfer. This will benefit a range of industries, including aviation, aerospace, defense, power, and automotive.
Keywords: Combustion, Combustion, Large Eddy Simulation, Combustor Liner, wall modeling, High Performance Computing, Turbine Blade, gas turbine engine, Conjugate Heat Transfer
