Cooling System Design And Optimization For The 1^ST Stage Rotor Of Heavy-Duty Gas Turbine

Having been in blooming development since 1940s, Gas Turbine is widely used now in various fields such as aircraft propulsion and power generation. Therefore, its performance requirement is rising continuously in order to meet different purposes of people. Higher aircraft thrust-weight ratio, lower fuel consumption and smaller space occupation can be seemed as examples for that. However, the Turbo cannot afford sustaining operation in high temperature environment, which is served as power-outputting part of Gas Turbine. It will increase the susceptibility to failure of Turbo due to thermal stresses; diminish Gas Turbine reliability and life expectancy in total.Two methods are mainly used in solving problems brought by temperature: we can either develop high-performance heat-resistant material or adopt proper thermal protection technique. Nowadays, basing on specific working environment and geometric parameters, people often design a compound cooling system formed by several essential cooling techniques in order to perform internal cooling, supplying air as coolant through the hollow interior of blade. On the other hand, the rapid upgrading of hardware makes numerical research on issues relating to complex internal cooling Gas Turbine blade possible.In this paper, numerical simulation about 1st stage rotor of certain heavy-duty Gas Turbine is performed by using conjugate heat transfer method. First, after taking the similarity of preparatory work for most tasks into account, detailed numerical simulation process and statistical information is given out. Then, basing on actual working condition data extracted from numerical simulation result of original blade referred earlier, the cooling efficiency with different type of ribs is discussed as preparation for optimization work. In order to make comparisons between original and modified results more noticeable, flow field analysis and other relative contents are presented at the last of this paper.The determined original cooling system design for 1st stage rotor can attain goals pre-assigned already, as numerical simulation result shows out legitimate blade surface temperature distribution and coolant inlet parameters. Nevertheless, modified cooling system design can enhance global and local cooling capacity even on the basis of that.