The aim of the work is to create and enhanced tool that help designers to investigate and full characterize thermal and structural behaviour of a turbine secondary air system. A complete design of such a system must take in account the physical iterations among different phenomena such as thermal equilibrium, flown network balance and structural deformations. These iterations can not be neglected due to the high impact to the overall system equilibrium and due to the accuracy in designing needed to increase turbine efficiency.
The main implication of this kind of analysis is that numerical recurrences between industrial methodological investigation tools are needed, with the outcome of a very long time consuming for the analysis initialization and with the production of a large amount of data that increases the overall complexity of the design phase.
The created tool called FLUITHEST offers to manage full associated numerical model of cold air flow network, thermal and structural model for Finite Elements analysis and establish rules and strategies to reach an integrated compatible solution among all the numerical solvers.
The numerical tools that has been integrated are commercial tools like Flowmaster, for the flow network solution, Patran-thermal for the thermal equilibrium solver and Marc for the structural analysis.
The integration procedure here presented, will have relevant effects in design, time consumption and, moreover, in increasing quality level of the design.
This paper will discuss in detail the methodology used to implement the tools, followed by a comparison between the results obtained with the original non iterative design and the new procedure. |
22-23 October 2012 Pacengo del Garda 
