Evaluation of heat transfer performance of a film-cooled turbine vane using metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation

This paper shows the ability of metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation to accurately predict the flow field on a particularly complex test case: a film-cooled turbine vane. Film-cooled turbine blades are very complex turbomachinery geometries because they are composed of a cooling network and many different-shaped film-cooling holes which makes these geometries extremely complex to mesh with structured meshing approaches (like multi-block hexahedral meshing methods). Consequently, metric-based anisotropic mesh adaptation seems quite appropriate for such applications as it has demonstrated that it provides automation of the whole process and it allows significant gains in terms of simulation accuracy by capturing coherent flow features proper to the turbomachinery physics. The film-cooled turbine vane simulation was made possible because the mesh-adaptive solution platform was successfully extended to periodic flows and domains.