Thermal Modeling of an Intermediate Pressure Steam Turbine by Means of Conjugate Heat Transfer—Simulation and Validation

Today's power market asks for highly efficient turbines which can operate at a maximum flexibility, achieving a high lifetime and all of this on competitive product costs. In order to increase the plant cycle efficiency, during the past years, nominal steam temperatures and pressures have been continuously increased. To fulfill the lifetime requirements and still achieve the product cost requirements, accurate mechanical integrity based assessments on cyclic lifetime became more and more important. For this reason, precise boundary conditions in terms of local temperatures as well as heat transfer coefficients are essential. In order to gain such information and understand the flow physics behind them, more and more complex thermal modeling approaches are necessary, like computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or even conjugate heat transfer (CHT). A proper application of calculation rules and methods is crucial regarding the determination of thermal stresses, thermal expansion, lifetime, or creep. The aim is to exploit during turbine developments the limits of the designs with the selected materials. A huge effort especially in validation and understanding of those methodologies was done with detailed numerical investigations associated to extensive measurement studies at onsite turbines in operation. This paper focuses on the validation of numerical models based on CHT calculations against experimental data of a large intermediate pressure steam turbine module regarding the temperature distribution at the inner and outer casing for nominal load as well as transient shut-down.