Large Eddy Simulation for Turbines: Methodologies, Cost and Future Outlooks

2013 ◽  
Vol 136 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tyacke ◽  
Paul Tucker ◽  
Richard Jefferson-Loveday ◽  
Nagabushana Rao Vadlamani ◽  
Robert Watson ◽  
...  

Flows throughout different zones of turbines have been investigated using large eddy simulation (LES) and hybrid Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes-LES (RANS-LES) methods and contrasted with RANS modeling, which is more typically used in the design environment. The studied cases include low and high-pressure turbine cascades, real surface roughness effects, internal cooling ducts, trailing edge cut-backs, and labyrinth and rim seals. Evidence is presented that shows that LES and hybrid RANS-LES produces higher quality data than RANS/URANS for a wide range of flows. The higher level of physics that is resolved allows for greater flow physics insight, which is valuable for improving designs and refining lower order models. Turbine zones are categorized by flow type to assist in choosing the appropriate eddy resolving method and to estimate the computational cost.

Author(s):  
James Tyacke ◽  
Paul Tucker ◽  
Richard Jefferson-Loveday ◽  
Nagabhushana Rao Vadlamani ◽  
Robert Watson ◽  
...  

Flows throughout different zones of turbines have been investigated using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and hybrid Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes-LES (RANS-LES) methods and contrasted with RANS modelling, more typically used in the design environment. Cases studied include low and high-pressure turbine cascades, real surface roughness effects, internal cooling ducts, trailing edge cut-backs and labyrinth and rim seals. Evidence is presented that shows that LES and hybrid RANS-LES produces higher quality data than RANS/URANS for a wide range of flows. The higher level of physics that is resolved allows greater flow physics insight which is valuable for improving designs and refining lower order models. Turbine zones are categorised by flow type, to assist in choosing the appropriate eddy resolving method and to estimate computational cost.


Author(s):  
Stephan Priebe ◽  
Daniel Wilkin ◽  
Andy Breeze-Stringfellow ◽  
Giridhar Jothiprasad ◽  
Lawrence C. Cheung

Abstract Shock/boundary layer interactions (SBLI) are a fundamental fluid mechanics problem relevant in a wide range of applications including transonic rotors in turbomachinery. This paper uses wall-resolved large eddy simulation (LES) to examine the interaction of normal shocks with laminar and turbulent inflow boundary layers in transonic flow. The calculations were performed using GENESIS, a high-order, unstructured LES solver. The geometry created for this study is a transonic passage with a convergent-divergent nozzle that expands the flow to the desired Mach number upstream of the shock and then introduces constant radius curvature to simulate local airfoil camber. The Mach numbers in the divergent section of the transonic passage simulate single stage commercial fan blades. The results predicted with the LES calculations show significant differences between laminar and turbulent SBLI in terms of shock structure, boundary layer separation and transition, and aerodynamic losses. For laminar flow into the shock, significant flow separation and low-frequency unsteadiness occur, while for turbulent flow into the shock, both the boundary layer loss and the low-frequency unsteadiness are reduced.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikko Auvinen ◽  
Leena Järvi ◽  
Antti Hellsten ◽  
Üllar Rannik ◽  
Timo Vesala

Abstract. Conventional footprint models cannot account for the heterogeneity of the urban landscape imposing a pronounced uncertainty on the spatial interpretation of eddy-covariance (EC) flux measurements in urban studies. This work introduces a computational methodology that enables the generation of detailed footprints in arbitrarily complex urban flux measurements sites. The methodology is based on conducting high-resolution large-eddy simulation (LES) and Lagrangian stochastic (LS) particle analysis on a model that features a detailed topographic description of a real urban environment. The approach utilizes an arbitrarily sized target volume set around the sensor in the LES domain, to collect a dataset of LS particles which are seeded from the potential source-area of the measurement and captured at the sensor site. The urban footprint is generated from this dataset through a piecewise post-processing procedure, which divides the footprint evaluation into multiple independent processes that each yield an intermediate result that are ultimately selectively combined to produce the final footprint. The strategy reduces the computational cost of the LES-LS simulation and incorporates techniques to account for the complications that arise when the EC sensor is mounted on a building instead of a conventional flux tower. The presented computational framework also introduces a result assessment strategy which utilizes the obtained urban footprint together with a detailed land cover type dataset to estimate the potential error that may arise if analytically derived footprint models were employed instead. The methodology is demonstrated with a case study that concentrates on generating the footprint for a building-mounted EC measurement station in downtown Helsinki, Finland, under neutrally stratified atmospheric boundary layer.


Author(s):  
Y. See ◽  
M. Wang ◽  
J. Bohbot ◽  
O. Colin

Abstract The Species-Based Extended Coherent Flamelet Model (SB-ECFM) was developed and previously validated for 3D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) modeling of a spark-ignited gasoline direct injection engine. In this work, we seek to extend the SB-ECFM model to the large eddy simulation (LES) framework and validate the model in a homogeneous charge spark-ignited engine. In the SB-ECFM, which is a recently developed improvement of the ECFM, the progress variable is defined as a function of real species instead of tracer species. This adjustment alleviates discrepancies that may arise when the numerical treatment of real species is different than that of the tracer species. Furthermore, the species-based formulation also allows for the use of second-order numeric, which can be necessary in LES cases. The transparent combustion chamber (TCC) engine is the configuration used here for validating the SB-ECFM. It has been extensively characterized with detailed experimental measurements and the data are widely available for model benchmarking. Moreover, several of the boundary conditions leading to the engine are also measured experimentally. These measurements are used in the corresponding computational setup of LES calculations with SB-ECFM. Since the engine is spark ignited, the Imposed Stretch Spark Ignition Model (ISSIM) is utilized to model this physical process. The mesh for the current study is based on a configuration that has been validated in a previous LES study of the corresponding motored setup of the TCC engine. However, this mesh was constructed without considering the additional cells needed to sufficiently resolve the flame for the fired case. Thus, it is enhanced with value-based Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) on the progress variable to better capture the flame front in the fired case. As one facet of model validation, the ensemble average of the measured cylinder pressure is compared against the LES/SB-ECFM prediction. Secondly, the predicted cycle-to-cycle variation by LES is compared with the variation measured in the experimental setup. To this end, the LES computation is required to span a sufficient number of engine cycles to provide statistical convergence to evaluate the coefficient of variation (COV) in peak cylinder pressure. Due to the higher computational cost of LES, the runtime required to compute a sufficient number of engine cycles sequentially can be intractable. The concurrent perturbation method (CPM) is deployed in this study to obtain the required number of cycles in a reasonable time frame. Lastly, previous numerical and experimental analyses of the TCC engine have shown that the flow dynamics at the time of ignition is correlated with the cycle-to-cycle variability. Hence, similar analysis is performed on the current simulation results to determine if this correlation effect is well-captured by the current modeling approach.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gokhan Kirkil

<p>WRF model provides a potentially powerful framework for coupled simulations of flow covering a wide range of<br>spatial and temporal scales via a successive grid nesting capability. Nesting can be repeated down to turbulence<br>solving large eddy simulation (LES) scales, providing a means for significant improvements of simulation of<br>turbulent atmospheric boundary layers. We will present the recent progress on our WRF-LES simulations of<br>the Perdigao Experiment performed over mountainous terrain. We performed multi-scale simulations using<br>WRF’s different Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) parameterizations as well as Large Eddy Simulation (LES)<br>and compared the results with the detailed field measurements. WRF-LES model improved the mean flow field<br>as well as second-order flow statistics. Mean fluctuations and turbulent kinetic energy fields from WRF-LES<br>solution are investigated in several cross-sections around the hill which shows good agreement with measurements.</p>


Author(s):  
Yoshinobu Yamade ◽  
Chisachi Kato ◽  
Akiyoshi Iida ◽  
Shinobu Yoshimura ◽  
Keiichiro Iida

The objective of this study is to predict accurately interior aeroacoustics noise of a car for a wide range of frequency between 100 Hz and 4 kHz. One-way coupled simulations of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), structural analysis and acoustical analysis were performed to predict interior aeroacoustics noise. We predicted pressure fluctuations on the outer surfaces of a test car by computing unsteady flow around the car as the first step. Secondary, the predicted pressure fluctuations were fed to the subsequent structural analysis to predict vibration accelerations on the inner surfaces of the test car. Finally, acoustical analysis was performed to predict sound fields in the test car by giving vibration accelerations computed by the structural analysis as the boundary conditions. In this paper, we focus on the unsteady flow computations, which is the first step of the coupled simulations. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) was performed to predict the pressure fluctuations on the outer surfaces of the test car. We used the computational mesh composed of approximately 5 billion hexahedral grids with a spatial resolution of 1.5 mm in the streamwise and spanwise directions to resolve the dynamics of the small vortices in the turbulence boundary layer. Predicted and measured pressure fluctuation at several sampling points on the surface of the test car were compared and they matched well in a wide range of frequency up to 2 kHz.


2018 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunfei Ma ◽  
Nagabhushana Rao Vadlamani ◽  
Jiahuan Cui ◽  
Paul Tucker

The present research applied a mixed-fidelity approach to examine the fan–intake interaction. Flow separation induced by a distortion generator (DG) is either resolved using large eddy simulation (LES) or modeled using the standard k–ω model, Spalart–Allmaras (SA) model, etc. The immersed boundary method with smeared geometry (immersed boundary method with smeared geometry (IBMSG)) is employed to represent the effect of the fan and a wide range of test cases is studied by varying the (a) height of the DG and (b) proximity of the fan to the DG. Comparisons are drawn between the LES and the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approaches with/without the fan effect. It is found that in the “absence of fan,” the discrepancies between RANS and LES are significant within the separation and reattachment region due to the well-known limitations of the standard RANS models. “With the fan installed,” the deviation between RANS and LES decreases substantially. It becomes minimal when the fan is closest to the DG. It implies that with an installed fan, the inaccuracies of the turbulence model are mitigated by the strong flow acceleration at the casing due to the fan. More precisely, the mass flow redistribution due to the fan has a dominant primary effect on the final predictions and the effect of turbulence model becomes secondary, thereby suggesting that high fidelity eddy resolving simulations provide marginal improvements to the accuracy for the installed cases, particularly for the short intake–fan strategies with fan getting closer to intake lip.


Author(s):  
Jean Lamouroux ◽  
Stéphane Richard ◽  
Quentin Malé ◽  
Gabriel Staffelbach ◽  
Antoine Dauptain ◽  
...  

Nowadays, models predicting soot emissions are, neither able to describe correctly fine effects of technological changes on sooting trends nor sufficiently validated at relevant operating conditions to match design office quantification needs. Yet, phenomenological descriptions of soot formation, containing key ingredients for soot modeling exist in the literature, such as the well-known Leung et al. model (Combust Flame 1991). This approach indeed includes contributions of nucleation, surface growth, coagulation, oxidation and thermophoretic transport of soot. When blindly applied to aeronautical combustors for different operating conditions, this model fails to hierarchize operating points compared to experimental measurements. The objective of this work is to propose an extension of the Leung model, including an identification of its constants over a wide range of condition relevant of gas turbines operation. Today, the identification process can hardly be based on laboratory flames since few detailed experimental data are available for heavy-fuels at high pressure. Thus, it is decided to directly target smoke number values measured at the engine exhaust for a variety of combustors and operating conditions from idling to take-off. A Large Eddy Simulation approach is retained for its intrinsic ability to reproduce finely unsteady behavior, mixing and intermittency. In this framework, The Leung model for soot is coupled to the TFLES model for combustion. It is shown that pressure-sensitive laws for the modelling constant of the soot surface chemistry are sufficient to reproduce engine emissions. Grid convergence is carried out to verify the robustness of the proposed approach. Several cases are then computed blindly to assess the prediction capabilities of the extended model. This study paves the way for the systematic use of a high fidelity tool solution in design office constraints for combustion chamber development.


Author(s):  
Salar Taghizadeh ◽  
Sumanta Acharya ◽  
Kong Ling ◽  
Yousef Kanani ◽  
Xuan Ge

This study presents a transient three-dimensional numerical study on fluid flow and heat transfer of flat-tube array using large eddy simulation (LES) covering both laminar and turbulent flow regimes. The simulations were performed in a rectangular region containing only one tube with periodic conditions specified on all boundaries. A staggered flat-plate array was first studied, and an existing solution was used for validation purpose. The numerical models were then applied to an in-line array composed of flat tubes with an aspect ratio of 0.25 and fixed tube spacings. By varying the in-flow velocity, the tube array was studied over a wide range of Reynolds number (600–12000). Temperature, velocity, and turbulent kinetic energy distributions as well as the interactions between them are presented and analyzed. Furthermore, the local heat transfer rate was analyzed along the various parts of the tube (leading edge, flat-top and wake or trailing-edge regions). Heat transfer correlation for each region of the tube and the entire tube array is proposed.


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