The Hybrid Pathway to Flexible Power Turbines, Part II: Fast Data Transfer Methods Between Varying Fidelity Simulations, to Enable Efficient Conjugate Thermal Field Prediction

Abstract

The global drive toward renewable energy is imposing challenging operating requirements on power turbines. Flexible load-leveling applications must accept more frequent and demanding start-stop cycles. Full transient analyses are too computationally expensive for real-time simulation across all operating regimes so monitoring relies on sparse physical measurements. Alone, these sparse data lack the fidelity for real-time prediction of a complex thermal field. A novel hybrid methodology is proposed, coupling data across a range of fidelities to bridge the limitations in the individual analyses. Combining several fidelity methods in parallel; low-order models, corrected by real-time physical measurements, are calibrated with high-fidelity simulations. A newly developed low-order thermal network code is used to predict the thermal field in real-time. High-fidelity flow characteristics are routinely transferred to the decoupled low-order solution. A critical enabling feature of this hybrid approach is the fast data interpolation between differing fidelity numerical simulations. This paper evaluates a spatial Kriging method for robust data transfer between two different fidelity mesh, tested in the case of thermal profile prediction of a power turbine. Additionally, a novel coordinate-based hash mapping process is demonstrated for the fast high-to-low fidelity data transfer. Localized hashing allows independent, parallel, nearest neighbor search at significantly reduced computational cost. The demonstrated method facilitates fast mesh pairing, necessary to support the real-time hybrid method for thermal field prediction during turbine transient operation.