Conjugate Heat Transfer Methodology for Thermal Design and Verification of Gas Turbine Cooled Components

Gas turbine design has been characterized over the years by a continuous increase of the maximum cycle temperature, justified by a corresponding increase of cycle efficiency and power output. In such way, turbine components heat load management has become a compulsory activity, and then, a reliable procedure to evaluate the blades and vanes metal temperatures is, nowadays, a crucial aspect for a safe components design. In the framework of the design and validation process of high pressure turbine cooled components of the BHGE NovaLT^TM 16 gas turbine, a decoupled methodology for conjugate heat transfer prediction has been applied and validated against measurement data. The procedure consists of a conjugate heat transfer analysis in which the internal cooling system (for both airfoils and platforms) is modeled by an in-house one-dimensional thermo-fluid network solver, the external heat loads and pressure distribution are evaluated through 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis and the heat conduction in the solid is carried out through a 3D finite element method (FEM) solution. Film cooling effect has been treated by means of a dedicated CFD analysis, implementing a source term approach. Predicted metal temperatures are finally compared with measurements from an extensive test campaign of the engine in order to validate the presented procedure.