Better understanding and more accurate prediction of heat
transfer and cooling flows in aero engine components in steady
and transient operating regimes are essential to modern engine
designs aiming at reduced cooling air consumption and improved
engine efficiencies. This paper presents a simplified coupled
transient analysis methodology that allows assessment of the
aerothermal and thermomechanical responses of engine components
together with cooling air mass flow, pressure and temperature
distributions in an automatic fully integrated way. This is
achieved by assembling a fluid network with contribution of components
of different geometrical dimensions coupled to each other
through dimensionally heterogeneous interfaces. More accurate
local flow conditions, heat transfer and structural displacement
are resolved on a smaller area of interest with multidimensional
surface coupled CFD/FE codes. Contributions of the whole engine
air-system are predicted with a faster mono dimensional flow
network code. Matching conditions at the common interfaces are
enforced at each time step exactly by employing an efficient iterative
scheme. The coupled simulation is performed on an industrial
high pressure turbine disk component run through a square
cycle. Predictions are compared against the available experimental
data. The paper proves the reliability and performance
of the multidimensional coupling technique in a realistic industrial
setting. The results underline the importance of including
more physical details into transient thermal modelling of turbine
engine components.