Efficient BEM Modeling of the Heat Transfer in the Turbine Blades of Aero-Parts

The modeling of the turbine blades in aero-parts presents difficulties in conventional domain solution techniques, especially when internal cooling air passages and a thermal barrier coating (TBC) are applied. This paper presents a very efficient 3D modeling of the anisotropic heat conduction in turbine blades with the boundary element method (BEM), where both the TBC and cooling air passages are considered. The BEM is very ideal for this modeling, since only boundary meshes are required for it; however, a serious problem of nearly singular integration will arise in modeling with coarse meshes. In this article, an efficient modeling and computational algorithm using the BEM is applied for the simulation of heat conduction in the turbine blades of aero-parts. The present work proposes a simplified BEM model to replace multiple thin coating layers on the top of the blade. In the end, the veracity of the implemented BEM code as well as its computational efficiency are illustrated with a few examples, showing that the settled temperature on the substrate can be reduced by 20% by employing a TBC. As compared to the analyses with ANSYS, the percentages of difference were within 2%, while the CPU time spent by the BEM algorithm was about 1/8 of that of ANSYS, not to mention the meshing efforts saved by adopting by a treatment of equivalent convection.