Aerothermic performance prediction of a film cooled Nozzle Guide Vane: about RANS anisotropic mesh adaptation applicability

This paper shows the beneficial effect of anisotropic mesh adaptation on aerothermic performance prediction of a complex component: a film cooled Nozzle Guide Vane. Film cooled turbines geometries are very complex and as a result it is almost impossible to mesh them with classical multi-block hexahedral meshing methods. For this reason flexible tetrahedral meshes are preferable. Discretization error (along with geometric error and modeling error) strongly impacts the evaluation of performances, leading to inaccurate results. Furthermore, the simulation process relies heavily on the experience of the engineer and usually it is not automatized. In order to automatize the simulation process, taking advantage of the flexibility of the tetrahedral elements and in order to contain the discretization error, metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation appears to be a suitable technology. In this work we will focus on the numerical aspects necessary to have an accurate prediction of the aerothermic performances (e.g cooling efficiency) of the Nozzle Guide Vane.