An automatic film cooling hole mesh generation system based on matrix dividing strategy

Film cooling is one of the essential measures to guarantee the turbine blade's durability. In the film cooling system design process, it is inevitable for researchers to generate the cooling hole mesh in order to perform the CFD simulation of turbine blades. However, generating hundreds of cooling holes’ mesh is time-consuming and requires plenty of manual operations. In addition, to implement the optimal film cooling hole distribution, there is a need to develop a parametric design methodology to arrange the position of cooling holes reasonably. The present paper develops an automated film cooling hole mesh generation system, which adopts a matrix dividing strategy to parameterize the film cooling system. The geometrical representation of the cooling-hole distribution is parameterized by m × n matrices. The system first splits the existing block based on the matrix parameters, dividing the blade surface into m × n pieces. Then, it uses a parametric system to design the cooling hole geometry and automatically generates cooling hole blocking lines at the pieces of interest. The cylindrical and fan-shaped hole topology can be automatically generated in the parametric system. Finally, the transfinite interpolation method is used to automatically produce the structured mesh from the blocking lines. This system can also use the above technologies to generate the cooling hole mesh on the tip of rotor blades. The film cooling hole mesh generation system has been integrated into our existing turbine blade design platform (NuFlux), which is designed to implement the fast changing of the 3D blade geometry and automated structured mesh generation. To verify the reliability of the cooling hole meshing system, the computational grids of NASA C3X film-cooled vane and transonic HPT rotor blade with tip cooling injection are produced using the system and examined in the mesh quality check system in NuFlux. The CFD simulation results using the grids are validated against the relevant experimental data. The integration of the cooling hole meshing system makes NuFlux a unique tool which is competent at turbine blade cooling system design optimization. Copyright © 2024 by ASME.