Analysis and Improvement of a Loosely Coupled Fluid-Solid Heat Transfer Method

A new, fast and reliable loosely coupled fluid-solid heat transfer method is described. The approach is based on an improvement of heat transfer coefficient Forward Temperature Backward method. The numerical analysis of the coupling process of an one-dimensional model, shows that the convergence behaviour is influenced by the physical Biot number and a virtual heat transfer coefficient. The effect of using partially converged CFD solutions has also been studied. The novelty of the method is based on the use of dynamic evaluation of the numerical parameters of the coupling, namely the virtual heat transfer coefficient. Two representative models in turbomachinery applications are applied to test the proposed method. It is shown that the computational time can be reduced by a factor of three to five relative to previous existing methods. The new approach only spends around two times the cost of stand-alone CFD simulation of the problem to obtained a coupled fluid/solid thermal analysis.Copyright © 2013 by ASME