Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis of Convection-cooled Turbine Vanes Using γ-Reθ Transition Model

Abstract

In order to achieve high process efficiencies for the economic operation of stationary gas turbines and aero engines, extremely high turbine inlet temperatures at adjusted pressure ratios are applied. The allowable hot gas temperature is limited by the material temperature of the hot gas path components, in particular the vanes and blades of the turbine. Thus, intensive cooling is required to guarantee an acceptable life span of these components. Modern computational tools as well as advanced calculation methods support essentially on the successful design of these thermally high-loaded components. The homogeneous, or sometimes also mentioned as “full”, conjugate calculation technique for the coupled calculation of fluid flows, heat transfer and heat conduction is such an advanced numerical approach in the design process and huge experiences on validation and application have been collected throughout the years. This paper summarizes the numerical approach for this method as well as provides a collection of numerical results obtained by the authors for validation cases for a convection-cooled turbine vane test case as well as comparison to calculation data for this test case provided in open literature. Furthermore, systematic studies on the impact of calculation parameters, e.g. hot gas fluid properties, and numerical models for turbulence calculation are performed and the numerical results are compared to the experimental results of the test case.