Comparative Study on Different Methods for Prediction of Thermal Insulation Performance of Thermal Barrier Coating Used on Turbine Blades

As turbine inlet temperature gets higher and higher, thermal barrier coating (TBC) is more and more widely used in turbine blades. For turbine blades with TBC, it is of great significance to evaluate the temperature distribution of its substrate metal quickly and accurately, especially during the design stage. With different degrees of simplification such as whether to consider the change of the geometric size of the fluid domain by TBC and whether to consider the planar heat conduction in TBC, three different methods used in conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulation to model the TBC of the turbine blades have been developed and widely used by researchers. However, little research has been conducted to investigate the influence of the three methods on the temperature distribution of turbine blade. To fill this gap, three geometric models were designed. They are a solid conduction model with a substrate metal layer and a TBC layer, a transonic turbine vane with internal cooling and TBC, and a plate cylindrical film hole cooling model with TBC. Different methods were used in these geometric models and their differences were carefully analyzed and discussed. The result shows that for the conduction model used in this paper, with the same TBC surface temperature distribution, the difference between the three methods is very small and can be ignored. For a transonic turbine vane with internal cooling, regarding the local maximum temperature of the substrate-TBC interface, the largest difference between the method in which TBC is considered as a thermal resistance or a virtual layer of cells and the method in which three-dimensional heat conduction equation of TBC is solved occurs at the trailing edge. The difference near the leading edge is below 2 K. When employed to the film cooling model, the difference of the laterally averaged temperature of the substrate-TBC interface can be 8 K which is mainly due to the change of the length to diameter ratio of the film cooling hole by TBC. If the substrate thickness is reduced by the thickness of TBC when three-dimensional heat conduction equation of TBC is solved, the temperature difference between the three methods will be quite limited.

Automated summary

As turbine inlet temperature increases, the use of thermal barrier coating (TBC) in turbine blades becomes more common. Evaluating the temperature distribution of the substrate metal is crucial during the design stage. Three different methods for modeling TBC in conjugate heat transfer simulation have been developed and used, but little research has been conducted on comparing their influence on the temperature distribution of turbine blades. This study analyzed and discussed the differences among the methods using different geometric models, showing that the methods have varying effects on temperature distribution depending on the specific application.