NGCM-18: High-fidelity simulations of the effect of freestream turbulence on turbine heat transfer

High-pressure turbines operate at flow temperatures above the melting point of the blades and an accurate prediction of heat transfer in these components is absolutely critical, in particular if further efficiency increases of modern jet engines are to be achieved.

Traditionally, the design of turbomachinery components has been exclusively accomplished with steady CFD, with Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models being the predominant choice. With computing power continuously increasing, high-fidelity numerical simulations of turbomachinery components are now becoming a valuable research tool for validating the design process and continued development of design tools.

In the current project, Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) and other eddy-resolving approaches will be performed of turbomachinery components to investigate the effect of freestream turbulence on blade performance and heat transfer, and to establish benchmark data for design tools.

The primary research tool will be an in-house compressible Navier-Stokes solver which is currently used in an on-going project on low-pressure turbines on UK national supercomputers and the University of Southampton research cluster, running on thousands of computing cores. The DNS data will serve as benchmark data for other turbulence simulation approaches with reduced computational cost, such as large-eddy simulation (LES) or hybrid RANS/LES methods.

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Prof Richard Sandberg, Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics research group, Email: [Email Address Removed], Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 7386.

This project is run through participation in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling (http://ngcm.soton.ac.uk). For details of our 4 Year PhD programme, please see http://www.findaphd.com/search/PhDDetails.aspx?CAID=331&LID=2652

For a details of available projects click here http://www.ngcm.soton.ac.uk/projects/index.html