Unsteady Cooled Turbine Simulation Using a PC-Linux Analysis System

Summary The first stage of the high-pressure turbine (HPT) of the GE90 engine was simulated with a three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Sokes solver, MSU Turbo, which uses source terms to simulate the cooling flows. In addition to the solver, its pre-processor, GUMBO, and a post-processing and visualization tool, Turbomachinery Visual3 (TV3) were run in a Linux environment to carry out the simulation and analysis. The solver was run both with and without cooling. The introduction of cooling flow on the blade surfaces, case, and hub and its effects on both rotor-vane interac-tion as well as the effects on the blades themselves were the principle motivations for this study. The stud-ies of the cooling flow show the large amount of un-steadiness in the turbine and the corresponding hot streak migration phenomenon. This research on the GE90 turbomachinery has also led to a procedure for running unsteady, cooled turbine analysis on commod-ity PC’s running the Linux operating system. Introduction