Accurate predictability of high-pressure turbine nozzle guide vane aero-thermal performance is highly desired in the development campaign due to the exposure of the component to a frequent and high heat load. In this paper, the representative vane profile in modern aero-engines is numerically studied. Aerodynamics and aero-thermal validations of the blade profile have been performed in comparison with the available experimental data. It has been shown that a satisfactory agreement could be achieved with the use of the transitional turbulence model shear stress transport γ–θ due to its superiority in capturing the laminar–turbulent transition. Sensitivity studies on the increase in the inlet turbulence intensity, inlet endwall boundary layer thickness, and inlet total temperature profile have been performed to understand the impact of inflow conditions’ uncertainty on the aero-thermal predictability. Increasing the inlet turbulence intensity increases the pressure surface heat transfer coefficient and induces an earlier transition onset on the suction surface. Due to the rapid decay of turbulence intensity in the numerical model, the use of an artificially high inlet turbulence intensity has been shown to be effective in the prediction improvement. On the other hand, the change in the inlet boundary layer thickness influences the formation and strength of the secondary flow, namely, horseshoe vortex and passage vortex. These secondary flow phenomena affect the local blade surface heat transfer coefficient in the near-endwall region although the most significant rise in heat transfer is found on the endwall. The temperature distortion amplitude of a hot streak and its relative clocking position with the vane significantly affect the heat flux distribution. In contrast, the heat transfer coefficient is less sensitive to the change in hot streak conditions. However, it has been shown that increasing the temperature distortion amplitude could induce a larger difference among different clocking configurations. In addition, decreasing the difference between the fluid and wall temperature would delay the transition onset and stabilize the boundary layer. Further analysis of the unsteady effects has been carried out by comparing the steady and time-averaged flow solutions. It has been observed that the discrepancy between these solutions is attributed to the flow field nonlinearity. Thus, a significant discrepancy can be found in the laminar–turbulent transition as well as in the trailing edge region. However, since the contribution of these regions on the total area-averaged heat transfer is small, their influence on the total vane heat transfer is limited.

Accurate and efficient predictions of the steady and unsteady flow responses due to the blade-to-blade variation as well as due to the nonaxisymmetric inlet distortion have been continually pursued. Computation of two problems concurrently has been rarely done in the past partly because of the need to perform whole annulus bladerow simulations, despite the advances in the current state-of-the-art methods with the phase-shift single passage simulations. The current work attempts to deal with this challenge by developing a new computational approach based on the principle of the multiscale method in the framework of a commercial solver (CFX). The methodology formulation relies on summation of the constituent source terms, each of which corresponds to a particular flow perturbation. The source term element corresponding to the blade-to-blade variation effect is linearly superimposed as in the classical Influence Coefficient Method. The unsteady flow field around a blade at any time instant depends only on its relative position to all its neighboring blades, so that the influences of an arbitrarily mis-staggered bladerow can be computed efficiently. In addition, the source term arisen due to the inlet distortion is calculated based on the spatial Fourier transform. A key enabler is that the source terms can be precomputed using a small set of identical blade passages. The source term is then propagated to different spatial and temporal locations depending on the combination of the mis-staggering pattern and the inlet distortion. The multiscale treatment makes it possible to predict a high-resolution flow field effects on the base coarse mesh as if a fine mesh were locally solved, while achieving a considerable computational efficiency gain. The proposed influence-coefficient and source term based method has been validated for test cases with a uniformly staggered bladerow, and for an arbitrarily mis-staggered bladerow, under a clean inflow condition as well as that subject to an inlet distortion.