The Effect of Unsteady Inlet Boundary Conditions on the Aero-Thermal Behavior of High-Pressure Turbine Vanes – A Numerical Study Using Scale-Resolving Simulations

Abstract

This paper presents the application of a novel method to prescribe unsteady boundary conditions to transient, scale-resolving computational fluid dynamics simulations of the high-pressure turbine in modern jet engines. The methodology is based on the compression of the interface data at the combustor–turbine interface, using proper orthogonal decomposition and Fourier series (PODFS). Doing so can reduce the stored data at the interface drastically. The capability of the PODFS method to produce realistic inlet boundary conditions was demonstrated in previous work. Here, the method is applied to a turbine case. The outlet data of a combustor simulation is used to create the PODFS boundary conditions for a scale-resolving simulation of a simplified first nozzle guide vane of the high-pressure turbine. This simulation is compared with simulations with steady-state boundary conditions to show the effect of unsteadiness in the inlet boundary condition on the aerodynamic and thermal behaviors of the turbine. While the aerodynamics show minor sensitivity against the way of applying the inlet boundary conditions, the thermal behavior of the vanes is strongly affected by the modeling of combustor unsteadiness.