DEVELOPMENT OF HIGH ORDER LES SOLVER FOR HEAT TRANSFER APPLICATIONS BASED ON THE OPEN SOURCE OPENFOAM FRAMEWORK

The computation of heat transfer phenomena in gas turbines plays a key role in the continuous quest to increase performance and life of both component and machine. In order to assess different cooling approaches computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a fundamental tool. Until now the task has often been carried out with RANS simulations, mainly due to the relatively short computational time. The clear drawback of this approach is in terms of accuracy, especially in those situations where averaged turbulence-structures are not able to capture the flow physics, thus under or overestimating the local heat transfer. The present work shows the development of a new explicit high-order incompressible solver for time-dependent flows based on the open source C++ Toolbox OpenFOAM framework. As such, the solver is enabled to compute the spatially filtered Navier-Stokes equations applied in large eddy simulations for incompressible flows. An overview of the development methods is provided, presenting numerical and algorithmic details. The solver is verified using the method of manufactured solutions, and a series of numerical experiments is performed to show third-order accuracy in time and low temporal error levels. Typical cooling devices in turbomachinery applications are then investigated, such as the flow over a turbulator geometry involving heated walls and a film cooling application. The performance of various sub-grid-scale models are tested, such as static Smagorinsky, dynamic Lagrangian, dynamic one-equation turbulence models, dynamic Smagorinsky, WALE and sigma-model. Good results were obtained in all cases with variations among the individual models.