Coupled Aerothermomechanical Simulation for a Turbine Disk Through a Full Transient Cycle

Use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model the complex, 3D disk cavity flow and heat transfer in conjunction with an industrial finite element analysis (FEA) of turbine disk thermomechanical response during a full transient cycle is demonstrated. The FEA and CFD solutions were coupled using a previously proposed efficient coupling procedure. This iterates between FEA and CFD calculations at each time step of the transient solution to ensure consistency of temperature and heat flux on the appropriate component surfaces. The FEA model is a 2D representation of high pressure and intermediate pressure (IP) turbine disks with surrounding structures. The front IP disk cavity flow is calculated using 45 deg sector CFD models with up to 2.8 million mesh cells. Three CFD models were initially defined for idle, maximum take-off, and cruise conditions, and these are updated by the automatic coupling procedure through the 13,000 s full transient cycle from stand-still to idle, maximum take-off, and cruise conditions. The obtained disk temperatures and displacements are compared with an earlier standalone FEA model that used established methods for convective heat transfer modeling. It was demonstrated that the coupling could be completed using a computer cluster with 60 cores within about 2 weeks. This turn around time is considered fast enough to meet design phase requirements, and in validation, it also compares favorably to that required to hand-match a FEA model to engine test data, which is typically several months.