GAS TURBINES

Optimize the preliminary design process by obtaining fast and accurate design results. Flownex^® Simulation Environment is the perfect tool to model turbine secondary flow systems, combustion, flow and heat transfer.

OVERVIEW

Flownex^® SE provides turbomachinery engineers with an easy to use, off-the-shelf tool for modelling combustion chambers, secondary air systems, blade cooling flows, lubrication systems with oil-air mixtures, as well as overall cycle integration and operation.

SECONDARY & COOLANT FLOW

Flownex^® includes a comprehensive rotating component library for analysing the secondary air system of a gas turbine engine. This enables engineers to quantify the bleed air consumption and flow distribution through the entire system. Furthermore, coupling Flownex^®with Ansys Mechanical enables engineers to perform detailed thermal studies of critical rotating components. Flownex^® includes:

Real gas models
Windage power calculation
Choking calculations
User-defined HTCs

SECONDARY FLOW

Blade Cooling

By coupling 1D flow Flownex^® models with 3D heat transfer models in ANSYS Mechanical or CFX, a
detailed turbine blade cooling simulation can be conducted. Flownex^® contains industry-standard pressure drop and heat transfer correlations for typical turbine blade features such as turbulator strips and pedestals. This allows designers to rapidly see the effects of their design changes on the maximum blade temperatures and cooling airflow rate.

LUBRICATION SYSTEM

The primary use of Flownex^® in lubrication systems is used to determine optimum drain line sizes given the limited space inside the engine. This requires two-phase pressure drop calculations in lines with oil-air mixtures. In parallel with this engineers can determine whether or not scavenge pumps are required for fluid transportation in the drain lines and, if so, what the pumping requirement will be.

COMBUSTION CHAMBER

Preliminary combustor design requires that an extensive number of geometrical and operational conditions be evaluated and compared. Especially during this phase, Flownex^® is an essential tool for combustor design engineers as it accurately captures important parameters such as the mass flow rate distribution through air admission holes,
associated pressure losses as well as liner wall temperatures.

Networks can be easily configured and solved within a few seconds. This result in substantial development cost savings because of the reduction in the number of detailed 3D simulations and rig tests required. A further advantage is the ability to use the Flownex^® results as boundary conditions for subsequent localized 3D models.

EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON

A comparison to experimental data published by NASA shows good agreement between the Flownex^® results and real-world temperatures of the liner wall for a wide range of operating conditions. The full report was presented at the 2016 ASME turbo expo.

SOLUTION TIME < 3 SECONDS WITH A MAXIMUM ERROR < 11%

INTEGRATED SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Flownex^® allows engineers to couple all turbine models (combustor, secondary flow, and lubrication) with the main flow path to understand the performance of the entire engine.

RESOURCES

Brochure

Download our latest Gas Turbine brochure or get in touch to discuss how Flownex can be applied in your Industry.

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Case Studies

FUEL FLEXIBLE COMBUSTION SYSTEM MODELLING WITH ZERO CARBON FUEL

COMPARISON BETWEEN FLOWNEX® SE AND 3-D CFD FOR SECONDARY FLOW MODELLING IN TURBOMACHINERY

GAS TURBINE COMBUSTOR DESIGN

Get more Case Studies

TESTIMONIALS

Flownex^® is able to accurately predict flow and heat transfer in secondary air systems, whilst reducing model setup and execution time substantially compared to 3D CFD.

Flownex^® is an ideal tool to develop reduced order models of complex thermo-fluid networks. I have used it extensively to model steam turbines, and because it simply does not take any shortcuts w.r.t. the fundamentals of thermodynamics, I can trust the overall system result.