LES of Gas Turbine Cooling Systems

Background

The thermal efficiency of gas turbines strongly depends on the combustion temperature, which can only be increased upon the availability of more effective cooling technologies. The design of the internal cooling system of gas turbine blades demands the accurate prediction of the turbulent flow and the convective heat transfer processes inside them. While RANS models are often used due to the computational efficiency, they suffer from severe accuracy limitations. Hence, LES seem to provide an attractive alternative for cases requiring a particularly high accuracy.

Project Description

In this thesis, an LES of a gas turbine blade cooling system, e.g., a ribbed multi-pass cooling channel or an array of jets impinging on a curved leading edge is supposed to be performed using the in-house Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) flow solver GALAEXI. The results shall then be used to assess the quality of different existing RANS solutions. To this end, the work is structured as follows:

• Literature review on the LES for internal flows
• Converting existing OpenFOAM mesh to a high-order mesh with PyHope
• Generating the turbulent inflow from a precursor simulation
• Simulation of the multi-pass cooling channel
• Documentation of the results

Your Profile

• Experience with the full CFD workflow
• Basic understanding of LES

Application

If you are interested, even if you don't fulfill all the listed requirements, please send your application (incl. CV and latest transcript) via e-mail.

Start: as soon as possible