An efficient steady state coupled fluid-solid heat transfer method for turbomachinery applications

This paper describes an efficient loosely coupled fluid-solid heat transfer method for steady state heat transfer analysis. The method is based on the improvement of a loosely coupled Dirichlet-Robin approach. The analysis of the loosely coupled process using a 1D model shows that the convergence rate is influenced by both, the physical and virtual Biot numbers. The impact of using incompletely converged CFD solutions has also been further investigated. The proposed method has been first validated against the analytical solution of a 2D coupled flat plate, and further applied to real turbomachinery configurations. The results have shown that the computational time has been substantially reduced compared to the baseline method, and it only spends around 35% more than a steady state CFD simulation, which is attractive for industrial applications.