Gas turbine computational flow and structure analysis with isogeometric discretization and a complex-geometry mesh generation method

A recently introduced NURBS mesh generation method for complex-geometry Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) is applied to building a high-quality mesh for a gas turbine. The compressible flow in the turbine is computed using the IGA and a stabilized method with improved discontinuity-capturing, weakly-enforced no-slip boundary-condition, and sliding-interface operators. The IGA results are compared with the results from the stabilized finite element simulation to reveal superior performance of the NURBS-based approach. Free-vibration analysis of the turbine rotor using the structural mechanics NURBS mesh is also carried out and shows that the NURBS mesh generation method can be used also in structural mechanics analysis. With the flow field from the NURBS-based turbine flow simulation, the Courant number is computed based on the NURBS mesh local length scale in the flow direction to show some of the other positive features of the mesh generation framework. The work presented further advances the IGA as a fully-integrated and robust design-to-analysis framework, and the IGA-based complex-geometry flow computation with moving boundaries and interfaces represents the first of its kind for compressible flows.