Abstract
The elevated flow temperatures and pressures exiting gas turbine combustors affect the efficiency and durability of the high-pressure turbine stage. Understanding the effects that result from the upstream combustor feature interactions in creating the combustor exit profiles are important to advancing gas turbines. Understanding how common combustor features, such as dilution jets and effusion cooling, interact based on computational predictions guided the design of a non-reacting profile simulator capable of producing a wide range of non-uniform temperature profiles representative of those entering high-pressure turbines. The mechanical design of a new simulator device, which will be experimentally tested in the future, is presented in this paper along with computational predictions of flow and thermal fields. The simulator was designed for modular installation into the Steady Thermal Aero Research Turbine (START), which is a continuous-duration, steady-state turbine facility. Features of the simulator included interchangeable liner panels with multiple rows of dilution jets and wall effusion cooling as well as independently controlled air mass flow distributions and source flow temperatures. To aid in the simulator design, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes modeling were conducted with a two-level Design of Experiments (DOE) approach to determine a number of engine-representative target profiles with temperature shapes that are mid-radius peaked, outer-diameter peaked, inner-diameter peaked, and uniform. A sensitivity analysis of the CFD DOE results determined which factors significantly affected the profile shape so that the target profiles could be produced.
