Abstract
In order to realistically model the heat and mass transfer over an internally cooled solid structure, such as
turbine blades, it is necessary to solve the heat equation for solid and fluid regions simultaneously. A conjugate heat
transfer solver is developed by explicitly coupling two existing solvers of open source CFD software package,
OpenFOAM (OpenFOAM, 2015). The both solvers are based on finite volume method. At each time step, temperature
fields for solid and fluid regions are obtained from a transient heat conduction solver and an unsteady incompressible
Navier-Stokes (with energy equation) solver, respectively. Then, the developed solver performs inner iterations by
resolving the heat equations for solid and fluid till reaching the desired accuracy in terms of the continuity errors of the
temperature and the heat flux on the contact surface between the solid and the fluid. The objective of the present study
is to investigate the effect of cooling channels inside a solid structure, such as a turbine blade, on the conjugate heat
transfer by using the developed solver. Within this scope, in the present study, conjugate heat transfer analysis is
performed for two benchmark problems, Couette and Backward Facing Step flow, and the results are compared to the
Couette and Backward Facing Step flow solutions of Ramsak (2015). Excellent agreement has been found between the
reference studies and the numerical solutions obtained for both of the benchmark problems. Then, preliminary results are obtained for an internally cooled airfoil in terms of conjugate heat transfer analysis. The obtained temperature
distribution on the airfoil in terms of temperature gradient is evaluated, whose high value is harmful for structure.
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