Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On the sensitivity of a helicopter combustor wall temperature to convective and radiative thermal loads

2016; Elsevier BV; Volume: 103; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2016.04.054

1873-5606

Sandrine Berger, Richard J. Kahnoski, Florent Duchaine, Gabriel Staffelbach, Laurent Gicquel,

Advanced Combustion Engine Technologies

The design of aeronautical engines is subject to many constraints that cover performance gain as well as increasingly sensitive environmental issues. These often contradicting objectives are currently being answered through an increase in the local and global temperature in the hot stages of the engine. As a result, hot spots could appear causing a premature aging of the combustion chamber. Today, the characterization of wall temperatures is performed experimentally by complex thermocolor tests in advanced phases of the design process. To limit such expensive experiments and integrate the knowledge of the thermal environment earlier in the design process, efforts are currently performed to provide high fidelity numerical tools able to predict the combustion chamber wall temperature including the main physical phenomena: combustion, convection and mixing of hot products and cold flows, radiative transfers as well as conduction in the solid parts. In this paper, partitioned coupling approaches based on a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) solver, a Discrete Ordinate Method radiation solver and an unsteady conduction code are used to investigate the sensitivity of an industrial combustor thermal environment to convection and radiation. Four computations including a reference adiabatic fluid only simulation, Conjugate Heat Transfer, Radiation-Fluid Thermal Interaction and fully coupled simulations are performed and compared with thermocolor experimental data. From the authors knowledge, such comparative study with LES has never been published. It is shown that coupling LES with conduction in walls is feasible in an industrial context with acceptable CPU costs and gives good trends of temperature repartition. Then, for the combustor geometry and operating point studied, computations illustrate that radiation plays an important role in the wall temperature distribution. Comparisons with thermocolor tests are globally in a better agreement when the three solvers are coupled.