GE’s Flow Simulator Enhances Lifespan and Reliability of BHGE’s Gas Turbine

Baker Hughes, a GE company (NYSE: BHGE), is the world’s first and only fullstream provider of integrated oilfield products, services, and digital solutions. The company is committed to enhancing customer productivity, safety, and environmental stewardship, while minimizing costs and risks at every step of the energy value chain. With operations in over 120 countries, BHGE combines over a century of experience with the spirit of a startup, inventing smarter ways to bring energy to the world.

The BHGE Secondary Flow & Heat Transfer team is tasked with a wide range of analyses in the gas turbine design process. The team's scope includes estimating the secondary air requirements for the entire turbine, providing boundary conditions for the thermomechanical analyses of the engine's main components, and supporting the estimation of the performance of the thermodynamic cycle, among other tasks. A key focus of the thermal design process is on the lifespan and reliability of the components, which are directly linked to controlling local temperature and thermal gradients. Additionally, the team must consider the required amount of cooling mass flow and the back flow margin (BFM), which quantifies the pressure margin to hot gas ingestion through a cooled component wall. The evaluation of the BFM is not deterministic but should be conducted statistically, considering all uncertainties of geometrical and thermo-fluid dynamics boundary conditions. As a result, component failure is evaluated probabilistically, determining the probability of failure.

The solution to the challenge faced by the BHGE team is the Flow Simulator developed by GE. The Flow Simulator offers a smart GUI that allows the team to upload the cross-section of the engine in the background, providing a clear overview of the model and its results. The GUI also enables the team to perform measurements directly on the imported cross section for a fast model setup. The Flow Simulator also includes a large database of 1D-elements suitable for simulating all features of the secondary flow network of an entire gas turbine. The software is highly flexible, thanks to the many correlations implemented and the possibility to tune and implement custom correlations. The Flow Simulator also features a stable and fast solver, along with a fast setup of multiple runs, which is crucial for simulating the system's behavior in different working conditions or performing statistical multirun approaches for a robust design. The tool has been successfully used for the analyses of the gas turbines of the BHGE fleet, as well as in the design and validation process of the recent gas turbines of the NovaLT family.