Gas turbines for military applications, when operating in harsh environments like deserts often encounter unexpected operation faults. Such performance deterioration of the gas turbine decreases the mission readiness of the Air Force and simultaneously increases the maintenance costs. Some of the major factors responsible for the reduced performance are ingestion of debris during take off and landing, distorted intake flows during low altitude maneuvers, and hot gas ingestion during artillery firing. The focus of this thesis is to study ingestion of debris; specifically sand. The region of interest being the internal cooling ribbed duct of the turbine blade. The presence of serpentine passages and strong localized cross flow components makes this region prone to deposition, erosion, and corrosion (DEC) by sand particles.

A Lagrangian particle tracking technique was implemented in a generalized coordinate multi-block Navier-Stokes solver in a distributed parallel framework. The developed algorithm was validated by comparing the computed particle statistics for 28 microns lycopodium, 50 microns glass, and 70 microns copper with available data [2] for a turbulent channel flow at Ret=180.

Computations were performed for a particle-laden turbulent flow through a stationary ribbed square duct (rib pitch / rib height = 10, rib height / hydraulic diameter = 0.1) using an Eulerian-Lagrangian framework. Particle sizes of 10, 50, and 100 microns with response times (normalized by friction velocity and hydraulic diameter) of 0.06875, 1.71875, and 6.875 respectively are considered. The calculations are performed for a nominal bulk Reynolds number of 20,000 under fully developed conditions. The carrier phase was solved using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with Dynamic Smagorinsky Model [1]. Due to low volume fraction of the particles, one-way fluid-particle coupling was assumed.

It is found that at any given instant in time about 40% of the total number of 10 micron particles are concentrated in the vicinity (within 0.05 Dh) of the duct surfaces, compared to 26% of the 50 and 100 micron particles. The 10 micron particles are more sensitive to the flow features and are prone to preferential concentration more so than the larger particles. At the side walls of the duct, the 10 micron particles exhibit a high potential to erode the region in the vicinity of the rib due to secondary flow impingement. The larger particles are more prone to eroding the area between the ribs and towards the center of the duct. At the ribbed walls, while the 10 micron particles exhibit a fairly uniform propensity for erosion, the 100 micron particles show a much higher tendency to erode the surface in the vicinity of the reattachment region. The rib face facing the flow is by far the most susceptible to erosion and deposition for all particle sizes. While the top of the rib does not exhibit a large propensity to be eroded, the back of the rib is as susceptible as the other duct surfaces because of particles which are entrained into the recirculation zone behind the rib.