Mesh Generation for Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis of a Cooled High Pressure Turbine Stage

Abstract

The presented work demonstrates the feasibility of quasi-automatic structured mesh generation for all details in the complex cooling system of an industrial high pressure turbine stage, as required by advanced Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulations. The grid generation software has been adapted in order to quasi-automatically mesh typical cooling configurations such as cooling passages, basins, inserts, solid bodies, cooling holes, slots, and rib turbulators. A multi-domain structured mesh with about 154 million grid points and 12,316 blocks has been generated for the turbine stage. It includes 1,000 cooling holes, over 250 rib turbulators and 150 pin fins for the turbine stage. In order to verify the CFD response to the grid properties, simulations were performed as a first step on the coarse grid level (of 21.8 million grid points) using the 3D flow solver package FINE™/Turbo. The conductivity equation was solved for the solid part of the computational domain using the same temporal discretization scheme as for the flow solver. Parallel, coupled fluid/solid calculations using the k-ε turbulence model were performed on three different configurations: nozzle guide vane alone, rotor-blade alone, and full stage. These results show the feasibility of this approach to mesh generation for use in CHT modeling of the complex configuration of cooled turbine stages.