MULTI-FIDELITY HEAT TRANSFER ANALYSIS OF SHROUDED HIGH-PRESSURE TURBINE ROTOR BLADES

CFD simulation is frequently used in the field of analysis, design, and optimization of complex geometries such as the film-cooled turbine blades of a modern jet engine. As increasingly higher turbine entry temperatures are being sought for, computational analyses need to be able to provide high-fidelity predictions of the metal temperatures and the heat transfer coefficient on these critical components. To increase the fidelity of the flow simulation, key physical aspects that characterize the operation of these components can be included in the model, particularly the fluid-solid thermal exchange, and the rotor-stator unsteady interaction. These effects that can impact the model's prediction capabilities are investigated in the present paper. The geometry under study is constituted by a fully-featured high-pressure turbine one-and-a-half stage of a modern commercial jet engine. Rolls-Royce's in-house software is used to carry out the 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes flow simulations. To enhance the fidelity in terms of fluid-solid thermal interaction, steady-state Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulations are conducted. The CHT results are then compared to experimental data from a thermal paint test. Phase-lag simulations are run in adiabatic-wall conditions to assess the impact of the stator-rotor interaction on the near-wall gas temperatures.