High-Fidelity Simulations of Gas Turbine Stages with GPU Acceleration

Project Description

The goal of this project is to leverage recent advances in high-fidelity LES, validated by DNS, to compute the flow in a High-Pressure-Turbine (HPT) stage at large Reynolds numbers, turbulence intensities and length scales to move closer to engine conditions.

The program will investigate the accurate flow prediction in HPT. The team will first concentrate on the HPT first stage nozzle, challenging due to the interaction with large-scale turbulent flow structures from the combustion chamber that may provoke large losses and heat loads. The team will move to an HPT stage to capture the stator-rotor interaction and the concerted effect of random unsteadiness (turbulence), deterministic unsteadiness (wakes and shocks) and potential effects. The team will investigate how these phenomena affect boundary layer stability and ultimately losses and heat transfer. Finally, the team will move to a full radial span vane calculation to investigate end-wall flows and their span-wise penetration.

The high quality of the simulations will allow a better understanding of loss generation, of both momentum and enthalpy mixing and of the effect of secondary flows. The results will constitute a reference data-set able to indicate weaknesses in current HPT design and the associated lower-order CFD based design tools. The results will also help unlock performance increase opportunities and ways to improve the accuracy of lower-fidelity CFD tools, the workhorse in design loops for many years to come.