Structural Deflection's Impact in Turbine Stator Well Heat Transfer

In the most evolved designs, it is common practice to expose engine components to main annulus air temperatures exceeding the thermal material limit in order to increase the overall performance and to minimize the engine-specific fuel consumption (SFC). To prevent overheating of the materials and thus the reduction of the component life, an internal flow system is required to cool the critical engine parts and to protect them. This paper shows a practical application and extension of the methodology developed during the five-year research program, main annulus gas path interaction (MAGPI). Extensive use was made of finite element analysis (FEA (solids)) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD (fluid)) modeling techniques to understand the thermomechanical behavior of a dedicated turbine stator well cavity rig, due to the interaction of cooling air supply with the main annulus. Previous work based on the same rig showed difficulties in matching predictions to thermocouple measurements near the rim seal gap. In this investigation, two different types of turbine stator well geometries were analyzed, where—in contrast to previous analyses—further use was made of the experimentally measured radial component displacements during hot running in the rig. The structural deflections were applied to the existing models to evaluate the impact inflow interactions and heat transfer. Additionally, to the already evaluated test cases without net ingestion, cases simulating engine deterioration with net ingestion were validated against the available test data, also taking into account cold and hot running seal clearances. 3D CFD simulations were conducted using the commercial solver fluent coupled to the in-house FEA tool SC03 to validate against available test data of the dedicated rig.