WHITE PAPER
Integrated Thermal Analysis of a Cooled Turbine Nozzle Using the AxSTREAM Software Platform Coupled with Ansys
Efficient turbine vane cooling designs are increasingly important in improving the thermal efficiency of gas turbines. Evaluating the performance and reliability of a cooling design requires knowledge of the temperature distribution on the vane surface and the cooling air mass flow rate. The estimation of the vane temperature distribution is a conjugate heat transfer problem, which usually requires a computationally intensive 3D computational fluid dynamics, finite element method (CFD-FEM) simulation. However, this approach is not suitable during early design phases, when the cooling system geometry changes frequently throughout design iterations.
Thermal analysis of the cooled turbine nozzle is one of the main steps in analyzing turbine cooling. At the preprocessing stage, the most important task is to determine the temperatures and heat transfer coefficients for the blade surfaces. This white paper highlights how to couple relevant AxSTREAM and Ansys tools to solve steady-state thermal analysis of cooled turbine nozzles.
