Learning Forum

[Jpret99]

Hi all, I am running an analysis as part of my thesis where i am conducting an analysis of a first stage gas turbine blade. I am wanting to investigate the effects of thermal mechanical fatigue. Right now i have run a simple steady state CFX to find the temperature distribution across the blade surface due to a hot gas inlet condition. What i would like to do now is run a simulation of the start up of the gas turbine, and couple the resultant mechanical loads with the thermal loads found using the CFX solver. This should hopefully replicate a simplified simulation of the start up sequence for gas turbines which largely contributes to blade failure.

My question is what would be the best solver to use in order to simulate and obtain the mechanical loads due to the start up of the gas turbine ? Right now im thinking along the lines of transient structural, but im really not certain as im relatively new to these types of analyses.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated ! Thanks !

[rfblumen]

Assuming that mesh deformations in the CFD model due to pressures/thermal effects can be ignored (which would other wise require a 2-way FSI analysis and be very computationally expensive), a 1-way FSI approach can be used. The steps are:
-Run the transient CFD model. Create intermediate transient results at certain time intervals.
In CFD-Post, read each time step in and export the pressure, temperature data. Since there are likely many time steps, this can be be scripted to create these exported files automatically.
Use External Data in WB to couple to Transient Structural. Import the files exported from CFD-Post to External Data.
In Transient Structural, set up load steps corresponding to simulation times consistent with the CFD results, and associate the imported data with each load step