Start-Up and Shut-Down Simulation of a Thermal Barrier Coated Gas Turbine Bucket Using CFD Code

The unsteady aerodynamics and aerothermics of a first stage gas turbine bucket with thermal barrier coating (TBC) and internal cooling configuration were investigated by application of a three dimensional Navier-Stoke commercial turbomachinery oriented CFD-code. Convection and conduction were modeled for a super alloy blade with TBC. This work is the second part of the paper “Unsteady 3-d conjugated heat transfer simulation of a thermal barrier coated gas turbine bucket”, and includes the simulation of shut down cycle. The CFD simulations were configured with a mesh domain of nozzle and bucket inter-stage using real turbine parameter data as boundary condition (BC) at nozzle inlet. The BC’s were adjusted in accordance with standard start-up and shut-down diagram for a gas turbine from Takahashi work [3]. Additionally a parabolic turbine inlet temperature was set for main gas flow. The problem was launched in a minicluster of 8 HP Workstation. Reasonably good comparisons in the main flow parameters with the manufacturer data were obtained. The effects of blade TBC surface temperature changes during a start-up and shut-down cycle were simulated using the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model. A TBC can be used either to reduce the need for blade cooling (by about 36%) increasing the turbine efficiency, while maintaining identical creep life of the substrate; and increase considerably the creep life of the blade while maintaining level of blade cooling (and therefore allowing the blade to operate at lower temperature for an identical turbine entry temperature).