scholarly journals Towards the Large-Eddy Simulation of a full engine: Integration of a 360 azimuthal degrees fan, compressor and combustion chamber. Part I: Methodology and initialisation

Author(s):  
Carlos Pérez Arroyo ◽  
Jérôme Dombard ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Benjamin Martin ◽  
...  

Optimising the design of aviation propulsion systems using computational fluid dynamics is essential to increase their efficiency and reduce pollutant as well as noise emissions. Nowadays, and within this optimisation and design phase, it is possible to perform meaningful unsteady computations of the various components of a gas-turbine engine. However, these simulations are often carried out independently of each other and only share averaged quantities at the interfaces minimising the impact and interactions between components. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art, this work presents a 360 azimuthal degrees large-eddy simulation with over 2100 million cells of the DGEN-380 demonstrator engine enclosing a fully integrated fan, compressor and annular combustion chamber at take-off conditions as a first step towards a high-fidelity simulation of the full engine. In order to carry such a challenging simulation and reduce the computational cost, the initial solution is interpolated from stand-alone sectoral simulations of each component. In terms of approach, the integrated mesh is generated in several steps to solve potential machine dependent memory limitations. It is then observed that the 360 degrees computation converges to an operating point with less than 0.5% difference in zero-dimensional values compared to the stand-alone simulations yielding an overall performance within 1% of the designed thermodynamic cycle. With the presented methodology, convergence and azimuthally decorrelated results are achieved for the integrated simulation after only 6 fan revolutions.

Author(s):  
Carlos Pérez Arroyo ◽  
Jérôme Dombard ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Nicolas Odier ◽  
...  

Abstract The design optimization of aviation propulsion systems by means of computational fluid dynamics is key to increase their efficiency and reduce pollutant and noise emissions. The recurrent increase in available computing power allows nowadays to perform unsteady high-fidelity computations of the different components of a gas turbine. However, these simulations are often made independently of each other and they only share average quantities at interfaces. In this work, the methodology and first results for a sectoral large-eddy simulation of an integrated high-pressure compressor and combustion chamber of a typical turbine engine architecture is proposed. In the simulation, the compressor is composed of one main blade and one splitter blade, two radial diffuser vanes and six axial diffuser vanes. The combustion chamber is composed of the contouring casing, the flame-tube and a T-shaped vaporizer. This integrated computation considers a good trade-off between accuracy of the simulation and affordable CPU cost. Results are compared between the stand-alone combustion chamber simulation and the integrated one in terms of global, integral and average quantities. It is shown that pressure perturbations generated by the interaction of the impeller blades with the diffuser vanes are propagated through the axial diffuser and enter the combustion chamber through the dilution holes and the vaporizer. Due to the high amplitude of the pressure perturbations, several variables are perturbed at the blade-passing frequency and multiples. This is also reflected on combustion where two broadband peaks appear for the global heat release.


Author(s):  
Carlos Pérez Arroyo ◽  
Jérôme Dombard ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Benjamin Martin ◽  
...  

Unsteady simulations of various components of a gas-turbine engine are often carried out independently and only share averaged quantities at the component interfaces. In order to study the impact and interactions between components, this work compares results from sectoral stand-alone simulations of a fan, compressor and annular combustion chamber of the DGEN-380 demonstrator engine at take-off conditions against an integrated 360 azimuthal degrees large-eddy simulation with over 2.1 billion cells of all previously listed components. Note that, at take-off conditions the compressor works at transonic conditions and generates an upstream-propagating shock that interacts with the fan modifying the shape of its wake with respect to the stand-alone simulation. Furthermore, the shock is seen as a tone in the pressure spectra at half the impeller blade passing frequency in the forward region of the engine. In the aft region, time-averaged fields are overall similar between stand-alone and integrated simulations but show a deviation in the azimuthal position of the hot-spot at the exit of the combustion chamber due to the addition of the diffuser. Pressure fluctuations generated in the compressor are captured in the combustion chamber as tones in the temperature and pressure spectra at the impeller blade-passing frequency and harmonics as well as an increase in the root-mean-square pressure.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (24) ◽  
pp. 8206
Author(s):  
Benjamin Martin ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Nicolas Odier

Numerical simulation of multiple components in turbomachinery applications is very CPU-demanding but remains necessary in the majority of cases to capture the proper coupling and a reliable flow prediction. During a design phase, the cost of simulation is, however, an important criterion which often defines the numerical methods to be used. In this context, the use of realistic boundary conditions capable of accurately reproducing the coupling between components is of great interest. With this in mind, this paper presents a method able to generate more realistic boundary conditions for isolated turbine large-eddy simulation (LES) while exploiting an available integrated combustion chamber/turbine LES. The unsteady boundary conditions to be used at the inflow of the isolated turbine LES are built from the modal decomposition of the database recorded at the interface between the two components of the integrated LES simulation. Given the reference LES database, the reconstructed field boundary conditions can then be compared to standard boundary conditions in the case of isolated turbine configuration flow predictions to illustrate the impact. The results demonstrate the capacity of this type of conditions to reproduce the coupling between the combustion chamber and the turbine when standard conditions cannot. The aerothermal predictions of the blade are, in particular, very satisfactory, which constitutes an important criterion for the adoption of such a method during a design phase.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Martin ◽  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Laurent Y.M. Gicquel ◽  
Nicolas Odier ◽  
Jerome Dombard

Abstract The coupling between different components of a turbomachinery is becoming more widely studied especially by use of Computational Fluid Dynamics. Such simulations are of particular interest especially at the interface between a combustion chamber and a turbine, for which the prediction of the migration of hotspots generated in the chamber is of paramount importance for performance and life-duration issues. The objective of the present study is to investigate available solutions to perform isolated simulations while taking into account the effect of multi-component coupling. Investigations presented in the paper focus on the FACTOR configuration. The fist step of the proposed method is to record conservative variables solved by the LES code at the interface plane between the chamber and the turbine of a reference simulation. Then, using the Spectral Proper Orthogonal Decomposition method, the recorded data is analysed and can be partially reconstructed using different numbers of frequencies. Using the partial reconstructions, it is then possible to replicate a realistic inlet boundary condition for isolated turbine simulations with both velocity and temperature fluctuations, while reducing the storage cost compared to the initial database. The integrated simulation is then compared to the isolated simulations as well as against simulations making use of averaged quantities with or without synthetic turbulence injection at their inlet. The isolated simulations for which the inlet condition is reconstructed with a large number of frequencies show very good agreement with the fully integrated simulation compared to the typical isolated simulation using average quantities at the inlet.


Author(s):  
Florent Duchaine ◽  
Jérôme Dombard ◽  
Laurent Gicquel ◽  
Charlie Koupper

To study the effects of combustion chamber dynamics on a turbine stage aerodynamics and thermal loads, an integrated Large-Eddy Simulation of the FACTOR combustion chamber simulator along with its high pressure turbine stage is performed and compared to a standalone turbine stage computation operated under the same mean conditions. For this specific configuration, results illustrate that the aerodynamic expansion of the turbine stage is almost insensitive to the inlet turbulent conditions. However, the temperature distribution in the turbine passages as well as on the stator vane and rotor blade walls are highly impacted by these inlet conditions: underlying the importance of inlet conditions in turbine stage computations and the potential of integrated combustion chamber / turbine simulations in such a context.


2005 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Mahesh ◽  
G. Constantinescu ◽  
S. Apte ◽  
G. Iaccarino ◽  
F. Ham ◽  
...  

Large-eddy simulation (LES) has traditionally been restricted to fairly simple geometries. This paper discusses LES of reacting flows in geometries as complex as commercial gas turbine engine combustors. The incompressible algorithm developed by Mahesh et al. (J. Comput. Phys., 2004, 197, 215–240) is extended to the zero Mach number equations with heat release. Chemical reactions are modeled using the flamelet/progress variable approach of Pierce and Moin (J. Fluid Mech., 2004, 504, 73–97). The simulations are validated against experiment for methane-air combustion in a coaxial geometry, and jet-A surrogate/air combustion in a gas-turbine combustor geometry.


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.


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