Towards Massively Parallel Large Eddy Simulation of Turbine Stages

Abstract

The context of integrated numerical simulations of gas turbine engines by use of high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) tools recently emerged as a promising path to improve engines design and understanding. Relying on massively parallel super-computing such propositions still have to prove feasibility to efficiently take advantage of the ever increasing computing power made available worldwide. Although Large Eddy Simulation (LES) has recently proven its superiority in the context of the combustion chamber of gas turbine, methodologies need to be developed and start addressing the problem of the turbomachinery stages, if integrated simulations based on LES are to be foreseen. In the proposed work an in-house code and strategy, called TurboAVBP, is developed for turbomachinery LES thanks to the coupling of multi-copies of the unstructured compressible reacting LES solver AVBP, designed to run efficiently on high performance massively parallel architectures. Aside from the specificity of such wall bounded flows, rotor/stator LES type simulations require specific attention and the interface should not interfere with the numeric scheme to preserve proper representation of the unsteady physics crossing this interface. A tentative LES compliant solution based on moving overset grids method is proposed and evaluated in this work for high-fidelity simulation of the rotor/stator interactions. Simple test cases of increasing difficulty with reference numerical are detailed and prove the solution in handling acoustics, vortices and turbulence. The approach is then applied to the QinetiQ MT1 high-pressure transonic turbine for comparison with experimental data. Two configurations are computed: the first one is composed of 1 scaled stator section and 2 rotors while the second computation considers the geometrically accurate periodic quarter of the machine, i.e. 8 stators and 15 rotors to test scalability issues of such applications. Although under-resolved, the LES pressure profiles on the stator and rotor blades appear to be in good agreement with experimental data and are quite competitive compared to the traditional (Unsteady) Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS or URANS) modeling approach. Unsteady features inherently present in these LES underline the complexity of the flow in a turbine stage and clearly demand additional diagnostics to be properly validated.