Effect of Turbine Inlet Temperature on Rotor Blade Tip Leakage Flow and Heat Transfer

Sung In Kim, M. Hamidur Rahman, Ibrahim Hassan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

One of the most critical gas turbine engine components, the rotor blade tip and casing, is exposed to high thermal load. It becomes a significant design challenge to protect the turbine materials from this severe situation. The purpose of this paper is to study numerically the effect of turbine inlet temperature on the tip leakage flow structure and heat transfer. In this paper, the effect of turbine inlet temperature on the tip leakage flow structure and heat transfer has been studied numerically. Uniform low (LTIT: 444 K) and high (HTIT: 800 K) turbine inlet temperature, as well as non-uniform inlet temperature have been considered. The results showed the higher turbine inlet temperature yields the higher velocity and temperature variations in the leakage flow aerodynamics and heat transfer. For a given turbine geometry and on-design operating conditions, the turbine power output can be increased by 1.33 times, when the turbine inlet temperature increases 1.80 times. Whereas the averaged heat fluxes on the casing and the blade tip become 2.71 and 2.82 times larger, respectively. Therefore, about 2.8 times larger cooling capacity is required to keep the same turbine material temperature. Furthermore, the maximum heat flux on the blade tip of high turbine inlet temperature case reaches up to 3.348 times larger than that of LTIT case. The effect of the interaction of stator and rotor on heat transfer features is also explored using unsteady simulations. The non-uniform turbine inlet temperature enhances the heat flux fluctuation on the blade tip and casing.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)73-93
JournalInternational Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow
Volume22
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01 Jan 2012

Keywords

  • gas turbine
  • heat transfer
  • tip leakage flow
  • turbine inlet temperature
  • CFD

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