LAUSR

Abstract The stochastic computations of a NASA gas turbine vane are conducted to investigate the effects of the operational uncertainties on the flow and heat transfer characteristics of the NASA C3X blade. The blade contains ten internal cooling channels to remove heat load. In order to minimize the analysis error the full conjugate heat transfer methodology has been employed to simulate the behavior of external hot gas flows, internal cooling air passages and the solid blade simultaneously. The v 2 - f turbulence model is used and it is shown the predicted results are in acceptable agreement with the available experimental data. Total pressure, total temperature, turbulence intensity, turbulent length-scale of the inlet and the outlet static pressure are assumed to be stochastic with Beta probability distribution functions. The effects of these uncertainties on flow and thermal fields as well as the blade temperature distribution are studied. The polynomial chaos method with polynomials order p = 3 is used to quantify the effects of operational uncertainties. The non-deterministic CFD results are found to be in close agreement with the experimental data. Uncertainties specially in inlet total temperature and turbulent length-scale play key roles on the hydrodynamic and thermal fields around the airfoil also the turbine vane temperature distribution.