Analysis of the aerothermal performance of modern commercial high-pressure turbine rotors using different levels of fidelity

In the field of design and optimization of sophisticated geometries such as film-cooled turbine blades of modern jet engines, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation is commonly employed. As the pursuit for higher turbine entry temperatures intensifies, it becomes crucial for computational analyses to offer accurate predictions of metal temperatures and heat transfer coefficients on these critical components. This study investigates the impact of key physical factors that characterize the operation of these components on the accuracy of the computational model. In particular, the effects of including the exchange of thermal energy between the fluid and solid domains, as well as modelling the unsteady interaction between the rotor and stator are studied. The research focuses on a fully featured one-and-a-half stage high-pressure turbine of a commercial jet engine, utilizing proprietary software for conducting 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes flow simulations. To model the fluid-solid thermal interaction, steady-state Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulations are performed. The CHT results are then compared with experimental data obtained from a thermal paint test, achieving good levels of agreement. Additionally, phase-lag simulations are executed under adiabatic-wall conditions to evaluate the influence of stator-rotor interaction on near-wall gas temperatures. This work shows that, by modelling the periodic unsteadiness at the stator-rotor interface with a phase-lag technique, the maximum near-wall gas temperature prediction is significantly increased, sometimes more than 100K, with respect to the steady-state model one. Findings from this work also suggest that simplified “strip” source terms used to model the presence of film cooling hole rows on the surface of a blade can be used with satisfactory accuracy only for nominal conditions. The mass flows delivered by each source strip should not be linearly scaled based on mainstream quantities for use in different conditions, but they should be recalculated from scratch for the new conditions.