Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine

The Gas Turbine enterprise solution meets the needs of designers and engineers dealing with gas turbines for power generation and aerospace engines and is developed by a dedicated team that is working together with the major gas turbine manufacturers in order to identify the industrial needs and to propose and deploy suitable and innovative solutions.

The major gas turbines manufacturers use Flowmaster during the design process in order to reduce prototyping costs, enhance the quality of product and speed up the product development. Among Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine users there are Kawasaki Heavy Industries, General Electric, Siemens, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Hitachi, Alstom and Ansaldo Energia.

Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine allows to study secondary flows, blade cooling, air bleed, lubrication and injection systems, flows inside the combustion chamber, gas mixing, and air leakages.

Besides the comprehensive component library in the Flowmaster core, the Gas Turbine enterprise solution includes specific components, created on purpose to model gas turbines. Among such components there are:

• Pressure and flow sources with swirl;
• Different types of stationary and rotating orifices and nozzles;
• Sequences of discrete losses;
• Rotating passages;
• Different types of labyrinth seals;
• Rotating cavities.

All these components are characterized by simple correlations based on empirical data, but it is always possible to use specific correlations that take into account the company data.

Besides the material library in Flowmaster, the Gas Turbine enterprise solution includes fuels and fluids typically used in the field of gas turbines. Each material and component can be customized in order to meet the specific demands of each manufacturer and to easily integrate company data.

Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine makes use of a 3D coordinate system to simulate the effects of rotating systems on the air flows inside the turbine. This 3D coordinate system, together with a specific swirl solver, allows to compute the swirl due to the rotating component accounting for free and forced vertexes. Furthermore, this solver allows to model the swirl evolution along the flow and to analyze the swirl growth or degradation, induced by the different geometric and mechanical turbine components. The swirl solver allows to accurately analyze the secondary air flows between rotor and stator. For this reason, there are specific rotating components, such as orifices, nozzles, passages, labyrinth seals and cavities. In particular, the rotating cavity is a complex component that allows an accurate modelling of the spaces between rotor and stator, considering its geometry and the presence of stationary, rotating or counter-rotating surfaces. Thanks to a specific graphical interface (Cavity Wizard) it is possible to digitize the 2D geometry of the cavity and to discretize it in different sections, as it is done in the finite element methods. The rotating cavity can have from 2 to 6 inlets or outlets in order to accurately model any geometry. In this way, the rotating cavity becomes a complex component based on a sub-network. Inside each cavity it is possible to get temperature, pressure, swirl and flow rate results.

Finally, thanks to Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine it is possible to study the mixing of different fluids and to compute the mixture properties. This can be particularly interesting for the modeling flows inside the combustion chamber.

Some components of the Flowmaster V7 Gas Turbine library

Characterization of the rotating cavity using the Cavity Wizard