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Direct numerical simulation of slot film cooling downstream of misaligned plates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2022

Haosen H. A. Xu
Affiliation:
Mechanical Engineering, Penn State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
Stephen Lynch
Affiliation:
Mechanical Engineering, Penn State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
Xiang I. A. Yang*
Affiliation:
Mechanical Engineering, Penn State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: xzy48@psu.edu

Abstract

When manufacturing a turbine engine, the combustor annulus and the turbine annulus are created as separate parts and assembled. This leads to an inter-platform gap between the two components, which must be supplied with leakage air to prevent ingestion of the extremely hot combustion gases into the interior of the engine. The combustor and the turbine are likely to misalign because of differential thermal expansion or assembly tolerances. This paper presents a direct numerical simulation study of inter-platform misalignment with leakage flow supplied at the junction of the platforms. The geometry is two misaligned plates with a cross-flow and a leakage flow simulated as a slot jet. The misalignment of the two plates gives rise to a forward misalignment configuration and a backward misalignment configuration, and the jet/cross-flow gives rise to a windward mixing layer and a leeward mixing layer. Compared with the aligned configuration, the cooling effectiveness immediately downstream of the gap decreases in the forward misalignment configuration and increases in the backward misalignment configuration; this response amplifies as the flow rate through the gap increases. In addition to the cooling effectiveness, we report flow statistics, including the velocity, the temperature, the turbulent kinetic energy and the relevant turbulent fluxes. We find strong turbulence generation in the leeward mixing layer and high turbulence level as a result. Mixing of the thermal energy, on the other hand, occurs predominantly in the windward mixing layer. The eddy viscosity and the eddy conductivity that are critical to turbulence modelling are also reported. We find negative eddy viscosity at regions where the incoming boundary layer starts to mix with the leakage jet. The analysis shows that the negative eddy viscosity is a result of flow hysteresis: it takes time, or travel distance, before the eddies in the incoming boundary layer and the eddies in the leakage jet come to an equilibrium, thereby favouring a transport Reynolds stress model over a local eddy viscosity type model. The novelty of this paper lies in the direct numerical simulations, which provide direct access to the near-wall flow field and clarify the effects of blowing ratio and platform misalignment on heat transfer. The novelty also lies in the data analysis, which sheds light on how this flow should be modelled.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. A sketch of an aircraft engine (GE, 2013) and a zoomed-in view of the inter-platform gap.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Schematic of the flow configuration. The origin of the $x$ coordinate is at the centre of the gap, and the origin of the $y$ coordinate is at the upper surface of the upstream plate.

Figure 2

Table 1. A list of the blowing ratio and the step size in the DNSs.

Figure 3

Figure 3. (a) A sketch of the grid in the direct vicinity of the gap. Here, we plot every third grid point in both the $x$ and the $y$ directions. (b) Velocity profiles at $x=-6d$ in FWD-M5. The thin lines correspond to $U^+=y^+$ and $U^+=1/\kappa \log (y^+)+B$, where $\kappa =0.39$, $B=4.3$ (Marusic, Monty, Hultmark, & Smits, 2013). (c) A sample time history of the wall stress on the downstream plate in FLT-M5.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Grid resolution at (a) $x=-0.5d$ and (b) $x=0.5d$. Here, $\eta$ is the local Kolmogorov length scale. The dip in $\varDelta _y$ at $y=0.25$ in (a) is a result of mesh refinement at the downstream wall, see figure 3(a).

Figure 5

Figure 5. (a) Cooling effectiveness and (b) skin friction as a function of the streamwise coordinate.

Figure 6

Table 2. The size of the separation bubble measured by the distance from the leading edge of the downstream plate to the flow reattachment location. Here, the flow reattachment location is where $C_f=0$.

Figure 7

Figure 6. Contours of the mean temperature in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. The three lines are the streamlines that go through $x/d=-3$, $y/d=0.5$; $x/d=-0.49$, $y/d=0$; and $x/d=0.49$, $y/d=0$. The streamlines are based on the time- and spanwise-averaged mean velocity. The two plates occupy the white regions in the plots.

Figure 8

Figure 7. Streamwise velocity profiles at a few $x$ locations in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2.

Figure 9

Figure 8. Instantaneous temperature in (a) FWD-M5, (b) BWD-M5 and instantaneous streamwise velocity in (c) FWD-M5 and (d) BWD-M5 at a constant $z$ location; ‘inst’ is for ‘instantaneous’. We could not visualize streamlines here because the instantaneous flow field is three-dimensional and the streamlines do not stay in the plane.

Figure 10

Figure 9. Contours of the turbulent kinetic energy in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. There is no free-stream turbulence.

Figure 11

Figure 10. Contours of the turbulent momentum flux $\overline {u'v'}$ in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. The plots cutoff at $\langle u'v'\rangle =0$. Again, normalization is by the free-stream velocity $U_0$.

Figure 12

Figure 11. Mean pressure $P$ near the leakage in case FWD-M5. Here, $P_0$ is the free-stream pressure.

Figure 13

Figure 12. Turbulent heat flux $\overline {u'T'}$ in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. Again, normalization is by the free-stream velocity $U_0$ and $T_h-T_c$.

Figure 14

Figure 13. Turbulent heat flux $\overline {v'T'}$ in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. Again, normalization is by the free-stream velocity $U_0$ and $T_h-T_c$.

Figure 15

Figure 14. Eddy viscosity $\nu _t$ in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. The red lines are the contour lines for $S_{12}=0$. Negative eddy viscosity is coloured using a different colour map from the positive eddy viscosity. A negative eddy viscosity corresponds to negative diffusion and is numerically unstable. Hence, we use two different colour maps for positive and negative eddy viscosity values. The blank regions, i.e. before the leakage jet mixes with the surrounding flow and the bottom part of the recirculation region, are regions where the turbulence level is essentially 0. We do not show eddy viscosity in these regions as computing an eddy viscosity in a close-to-laminar flow incurs large errors.

Figure 16

Figure 15. Contours of $\log _{10}(T_u/T_U)$ in (a) BWD-M5 and (b) FWD-M5.

Figure 17

Figure 16. The angle between the turbulent heat flux vector and the mean temperature gradient vector in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. The red lines are the contour lines for $\sqrt {\langle u'\theta '\rangle ^2+\langle v'\theta '\rangle ^2}<10^{-3}$, i.e. a very small value.

Figure 18

Figure 17. Skin friction coefficient in (a) FWD-M5, (c) FWD-M2, (e) FLT-M5, (g) FLT-M2, (i) BWD-M5, (k) BWD-M2. Cooling effectiveness in (b) FWD-M5, (d) FWD-M2, ( f) FLT-M5, (h) FLT-M2, (j) BWD-M5, (l) BWD-M2.

Figure 19

Figure 18. A sketch of how one can measure deviations from the Boussinesq eddy viscosity assumption. Here, blue arrows indicate eigenvectors of ${\boldsymbol b}$, i.e. columns of ${\boldsymbol v}_1$, and red arrows indicate eigenvectors of ${\boldsymbol S}$, i.e. columns of ${\boldsymbol v}_2$. Both ${\boldsymbol v}_{1}$ and ${\boldsymbol v}_2$ are unitary matrix and therefore the arrows are of unit length. We use $\alpha$ to denote the angle between ${\boldsymbol b}$ eigenvectors and ${\boldsymbol S}$ eigenvectors.

Figure 20

Figure 19. The angle between the eigenvectors of ${\boldsymbol b}$ and ${\boldsymbol S}$ (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5 and ( f) BWD-M2. The three thin solid black lines are streamlines. The colour bar range is between $-\pi$ and $\pi$. We blank out the laminar region where the turbulent kinetic energy is essentially 0.

Figure 21

Figure 20. Eddy conductivity computed according to (A4) in (a) FWD-M5, (b) FWD-M2, (c) FLT-M5, (d) FLT-M2, (e) BWD-M5, and ( f) BWD-M2. The three thin solid black lines are streamlines. We blank out regions with which the turbulent heat flux is essentially 0.

Figure 22

Figure 21. RANS results for FWD-M5. (a) Skin friction coefficient; (b) cooling effectiveness. We double the DNS grid resolution in both $x$ and $y$ directions, and the fine grid RANSs are denoted using ‘fine’.