High-Fidelity Film-Cooled Rotor High Pressure Turbine Simulation using Metric-Based Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation

This paper shows the ability of metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation to accurately predict the aerodynamic flow field on a particularly complex test case: a film-cooled rotor high pressure turbine. Film-cooled high pressure turbine blades are very complex turbomachinery components that in recent years results in very complex geometries. In fact increasing temperatures in the combustion chamber results in cooling needs on the blade surface. For this reason, the film cooled turbine are composed of a cooling network and many different-shaped film-cooling holes which makes these geometries extremely complex to mesh with structured standard meshing approaches. Consequently, metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation seems quite appropriate for such applications thanks to the fact that it provides automation of the whole process and it allows significant gains in terms of simulation accuracy by capturing coherent flow features proper to the turbomachinery physics. The benefits in terms of accuracy and mesh-convergence are demonstrated on a realistic film-cooled rotor high pressure turbine.