CONJUGATE HEAT TRANSFER ANALYSIS FOR GAS TURBINE FILM-COOLED BLADE

This paper presents results of a study of the conjugate heat transfer (CHT) to calculate the metal temperature for a film-cooled gas turbine blade. ANSYS CFX14.0 code was selected as the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) tool to perform the CHT simulation. The two-equation SST turbulence model with automatic wall treatment was employed. The main flow inlet and exit boundary conditions were deduced from a multi-blade-row CFD code, Fine/Turbo by NUMECA. A core engine test operated at the maximum power condition. Thermocouples were used to validate the blade metal temperature calculations. The blade temperature comparison between test data and CHT predictions was in good agreement except at the suction side near the leading edge region. The pressure, temperature and Mach number distributions for blade internal and external flows were presented and examined. The streamline contours of the film flows on the pressure side and suction side were plotted and used to visualize the cooling effectiveness. In order to evaluate the influence of the turbulence model, the thermal results of four additional turbulence models (SA, RNQ K-epsilon, and SST with transition control) were compared to the test data. The SST model is suggested to be the appropriate turbulence model for the film-cooled blade temperature calculation in this study.