Interaction of Wheelspace Coolant and Main Flow in a New Aeroderivative Low Pressure Turbine

Abstract

Increased computational capabilities make available for the aero/thermal designers new powerful tools to include more geometrical details, improving the accuracy of the simulations and reducing design costs and time. In the present work, a low-pressure turbine was analyzed, modeling the rotor-stator including the wheel space region. Attention was focused on the interaction between the coolant and the main flow in order to obtain a more detailed understanding of the behavior of the angel wings, to evaluate the wall heat flux distribution, and to prevent hot gas ingestion. Issues of component reliability related to thermal stress require accurate modeling of the turbulence and unsteadiness of the flow field. To satisfy this accuracy requirement, a full 3D URANS simulation was carried out. A reduced count ratio technique was applied in order to decrease numerical simulation costs. The study was carried out to investigate a new two-stage low-pressure turbine from GE Infrastructure Oil & Gas to be coupled to a new aeroderivative gas generator (the LM2500+G4) developed by GE Infrastructure, Aviation.