Computational Optimization of a Loosely-Coupled Strategy for Scale-Resolving CHT CFD Simulation of Gas Turbine Combustors

The accurate prediction of heat fluxes and, thus, metal wall temperatures of gas turbine (GT) combustor liners is a complicated and numerically expensive task. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) support for the design of cooling systems is essential to ensure safe and proper operation of the entire gas turbine engine. Indeed, it is well known how complicated, and, at the same time, expensive it is to carry out experimental campaigns inside combustors operating under working conditions, and, therefore, pressurized and having high temperatures. The correct prediction of thermal fluxes in a CFD simulation depends on the proper modeling of all the involved phenomena and their interactions with each other. For this reason, Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulations are mandatory in gas turbine cooling system applications. Multiphysics and multiscale simulations, based on loosely-coupled approaches, have emerged as extremely effective numerical tools, providing enormous computational time savings, as compared with standard CHT simulations. The fundamental advantage of such approaches is based on the fact that each heat transfer mechanism is solved with the most suitable numerical setup, which leads to the use of spatial and temporal resolutions following the characteristic time scales of each phenomenon to be solved. For industrial applications, where the availability of numerical resources is limited and, at the same time, the timelines with which to obtain results are rather tight, having robust and easy-to-use loosely-coupled solutions available for the design of combustion chamber cooling systems would be extremely valuable. In this context, the objective of this work was to perform an initial optimization step for the multiphysics and multiscale tool, U-THERM3D, developed at the University of Florence to revise the coupling strategy workflow with a view to making the numerical tool faster and easier to use. The revised methodology was applied to the RSM gas turbine combustor model test case developed with cooperation between the Universities of Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, and the DLR. In particular, all experimental tests were conducted by the Institute of Reactive Flows and Diagnostics (Reaktive Strömungen und Messtechnik) of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at TU Darmstadt, from which the gas turbine combustor model takes its name. The newly obtained results were compared and analyzed, both qualitatively and in terms of computational time savings, with those previously achieved with the current version of the U-THERM3D tool already studied by the authors and available in the literature. Moreover, an analysis of computing times was carried out relative to the super-computing center used for the different adopted methodologies.