Large Eddy Simulation (LES) Flow Solver Suitable for Modeling Conjugate Heat Transfer

Accurate prediction heat transfer in gas turbine components subject to cooling requires high fidelity modeling of heat transfer in the presence of high Reynolds number turbulent flow. The cooling internal to the blades results in sustained temperature gradients within the structural parts, from low temperature in the interior of the structure to increasingly higher temperature closer to the surface subject to viscous heating and multiphase flow phenomena, such as deposition of hot particles inside gas turbine. Consequently, the heat conduction equation needs to be solved to capture the thermal behavior within the structural part. To this end, two main ingredients play significant role in modeling this high Reynolds number turbulent heat transfer phenomenon, namely Wall Layer Modeling of Large Eddy Simulation (LES-WLM) and Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) which governs the thermal coupling between fluid and solid. This project offers a tremendous opportunity to perform feasibility study of turbulent CHT simulations using WMLES in both monolithic and segregated modes. It should be noted that having all the fluid and solid physics modeling covered in a single solver – the monolithic approach – is not necessarily more efficient since we are dealing with fluid-solid time scale disparity.