Coupled FE-CFD Thermal Analysis for a Cooled Turbine Disk

This paper presents transient aero-thermal analysis for a gas turbine disk and the surrounding air flows through a transient slam acceleration/deceleration “square cycle” engine test, and compares predictions with engine measurements. The transient solid-fluid interaction calculations were performed with an innovative coupled finite element (FE) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. The computer model includes an aero-engine high pressure turbine (HPT) disk, adjacent structure, and the surrounding internal air system cavities. The model was validated through comparison with the engine temperature measurements and is also compared with industry standard standalone FE modelling. Numerical calculations using a 2D FE model with axisymmetric and 3D CFD solutions are presented and compared. Strong coupling between CFD solutions for different air system cavities and the FE solid model led to some numerical difficulties. These were addressed through improvement to the coupling algorithm. Overall performance of the coupled approach is very encouraging giving temperature predictions as good as a traditional model that had been calibrated against engine measurements.