Aerothermal Investigations on Turbine Endwalls and Blades (AITEB)

Abstract

This paper delivers an overview on the European research project AITEB (Aerothermal Investigations on Turbine Endwalls and Blades), which started in year 2000 in the course of the 5th Framework Programme (GROWTH). The project shall deliver an integrated technology and design tool package for the advanced, aerothermal highly loaded design of turbine endwalls and blades. It focuses on the following technical tasks : A) Heat transfer/cooling in separated flow areas: Experimental and numerical investigation of heat transfer and film-cooling in separated flow for highly loaded blades including advanced trailing edge cooling (Work Package 1&2). B) Heat transfer/ improved cooling of turbine endwalls: Experimental and numerical work on heat transfer and cooling of turbine endwalls (Work Package 3, 4 & 5). These work packages comprise new technologies for passive shroud cooling and unshrouded blade tip groove cooling. C) Optimised CFD-process, which aims to validate and optimise the whole CFD-process (drawing-grid-modelling-postprocessing-risk assessment) in order to derive the,, best practice” for engineers to use CFD as a risk reduction and time effective tool. (WP6) Experimental results of test series at various test sites are presented and compared to numerical simulations of the eight industrial partners (Rolls-Royce Deutschland (co-ordinator), ALSTOM Power, Avio, ITP, MTU Aero Engines, Turbomeca, Volvo Aero Corp., Snecma Moteurs) and eight research establishments and Universities (DLR, VKI, Univ. of Cambridge, Univ. of Karlsruhe, Univ. of Florence, Univ. of German Armed forces Munich, Polisch Academy of Science, Techn. Univ. of Berlin). Key results of AITEB are in the development of physical understanding and validation of CFD for aerothermal purposes in the area of complex and separated flows. Furthermore, in case of tip regions of blades (either shouded or shroudless) existing cooling technologies are investigated in order to derive a basis for an optimization of the specific cooling technology.