Hyper-reduced-order model for estimating convection heat transfer coefficients of turbine rotors

Abstract

Forced convection heat transfer occurs inside the steam turbine, and it is crucial for thermal and strength analysis to accurately estimate the convection heat transfer coefficients of the turbine rotor. This paper presents a hyper-reduced-order model for efficiently estimating the forced convection heat transfer coefficients of a steam turbine rotor. Unlike the full-order finite element method, the hyper-reduced-order model uses the discrete empirical interpolation method to approximate the domain integration of transient heat conduction simulations. This approach greatly reduces the degrees of freedom of numerical integration, thus substantially improving the computational efficiency of forward heat conduction problems. The hyper-reduced-order model and Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm are combined to minimize temperature errors between the numerical simulation results and remote sensor measurements and iteratively estimate the heat transfer coefficients of forced convection in the rotor. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model are verified through a transient heat conduction simulation. Moreover, the effects of the initial guess values and measurement errors are investigated to demonstrate the universality and robustness of the proposed approach in determining the convection heat transfer coefficient. Compared with the full-order finite element model, the proposed hyper-reduced-order model can increase the efficiency of forward heat conduction simulations of the turbine rotor by more than 10 times, and it only takes 0.87 s computer runtime in single transient step simulation, and then rapidly estimate the forced convection heat transfer coefficients. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed approach is insensitive to the initial guess values, and it exhibits great robustness under measurement error. The mean errors are 4.78 %, 2.67 % and 10.51 % when the initial values are 0.015 mW·mm−3·°C−1, 0.05 mW·mm−3·°C−1 and 0.15 mW·mm−3·°C−1 respectively. When there is no measurement error, the estimated error of the convection heat transfer coefficients is 2.67 %, and even if the measurement error reaches 5 %, and the accuracy loss is only 5.57 %. Consequently, this approach is highly suitable for estimating convection heat transfer coefficients during the dynamic operation of steam turbines, and this research provides reliable guidance for the optimization design and safe operation of steam turbines.