Session: 13-08 Heat Exchangers (II)

Paper Number: 127596

127596 - Development of Heat Exchanger Modelling Capability for a Finite Volume Aeroelasticity Solver 

Heat exchangers are frequently used in aero engines and are known to significantly affect the surrounding flow. It is therefore important for aeroelastic simulations to include the effects of any heat exchangers in the flow domain. The aim of this project is to develop heat exchanger modelling capability for an in-house finite volume aeroelasticity solver, and in this paper we present the current progress towards this goal. We represent the heat exchanger as a porous medium, as is the established approach in existing aerodynamic studies using commercial CFD software. For this we consider a Darcy-Forchheimer porous media model suitable for unsteady and compressible flows. The governing equations for this model are presented, which are derived by the application of volume averaging theory to the Navier-Stokes equations. The implementation of this model within the time integration method used for the solver is then described. The new modelling capability is then verified by comparison of results against an established commercial CFD solver, for a series of three-dimensional representative test cases involving both steady and unsteady flows. Close agreement between both in-house and commercial solvers has been observed, which is promising towards the future goals of application to aeroelastic analyses of turbomachinery flows featuring heat exchangers. 

Presenting Author: Sam Mitchell Imperial College London

Presenting Author Biography: The author is a research associate at the Vibration University Technology Centre at Imperial College London. His main research interest is the development of computational fluid dynamics methods for turbomachinery aeroelasticity problems.

Authors:

Sam Mitchell Imperial College London
Irene Tartaruga Rolls-Royce
Sina Stapelfeldt Imperial College London