Three Dimensional Heat Transfer Analysis of High Pressure Turbine Blade

The present tendency of creating new aircraft engines with a higher level of fuel efficiency leads to the necessity to increase gas temperature at a high pressure turbine (HPT) inlet. To design such type of engines, the improvement of accuracy of the computational analysis is required. According to this the numerical analysis methods are constantly developing worldwide. The leading firms in designing aircraft engines carry out investigations in this field. However, this problem has not been resolved completely yet because there are many different factors affecting HPT blade heat conditions. In addition in some cases the numerical methods and approaches require tuning (for example to predict laminar-turbulent transition region or to describe the interaction of boundary layer and shock wave). In this work our advanced approach of blade heat condition numerical estimation based on the three-dimensional computational analysis is presented. The object of investigation is an advanced aircraft engine HPT first stage blade. The given analysis consists of two interrelated parts. The first part is a stator-rotor interaction modeling of the investigated turbine stage (unsteady approach). Solving this task we devoted much attention to modeling unsteady effects of stator-rotor interaction and to describing an influence of applied inlet boundary conditions on the blade heat conditions. In particular, to determine the total pressure, flow angle and total temperature distributions at the stage inlet we performed a numerical modeling of the combustor chamber of the investigated engine. The second part is a flow modeling in the turbine stage using flow parameters averaging on the stator-rotor interface (steady approach). Here we used sufficiently finer grid discretization to model all perforation holes on the stator vane and rotor blade, endwalls films in detail and to apply conjugate heat transfer approach for the rotor blade. Final results were obtained applying the results of steady and unsteady approaches. Experimental data of the investigated blade heat conditions are presented in the paper. These data were obtained during full size experimental testing the core of the engine and were collected using two different type of experimental equipment: thermocouples and thermo-crystals. The comparison of experimental data and final results meets the requirements of our investigation.