ADVANCED COOLING TECHNOLOGIES INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N19B-T027

Description

With gas turbines becoming smaller and more powerful the need to accurately predict the temperature distribution of the turbine blades become crucial. The high Reynolds number (Re), poorly behave flow encountered in gas turbines makes Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) inaccurate and Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) too expensive to be used as analysis tools. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approaches are able to capture the unsteady behavior in turbulent flows, however at 5-10x increased computational cost. In order to capture the heat transfer with conventional LES the majority of the computational resource need to be spent on resolving the viscous and thermal boundary layer. One means of decreasing the computational cost to resolve boundary layer is to use wall modeled LES approaches. Such wall models can capture the wall shear stress accurately, but fails to predict the heat transfer coefficients correctly. ACT proposes to utilize a dynamic boundary sampling method to develop thermal wall models capable of capturing the shear stress as well as the heat transfer coefficients. Essentially increasing the effective range of Reynolds numbers that can be investigate by LES with conjugated heat transfer.