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Turbine Vorticity
Whether in airplane engines or power plants, turbine blades are often subjected to extremely high temperatures. The blades are cooled internally with cold air flowing through serpentine channels. This image shows a section of a channel wall near a rib. Isosurfaces of instantaneous, coherent vorticity created by shear layer instabilities on the rib enhance mixing and heat transfer. The regions of coherent vorticity are correlated to regions of high heat transfer (blue) on channel walls. Hot spots (red) are found at corners and immediately behind the rib. The software used in producing these simulations was developed with support of a National Science Foundation grant. [Image 1 of 3 related images. See Image 2.]
More about this Image
This simulation was created by Danesh Tafti and Randy Heiland of the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) at the University of Illinois (UI) at Urbana-Champaign, using GenIDLEST computational fluid dynamics software and NCSA VisBench, a visualization system. Research represented in the visualization of the multilouvered fin is supported by the Air Conditioning Refrigeration Center at UI-Urbana-Champaign.
Credit: Danesh Tafti and Randy Heiland, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; courtesy NCSA
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