Two-Phase Flow Simulation of Mist Film Cooling on Turbine Blades With Conjugate Internal Cooling

2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianchang Li ◽  
Ting Wang

Effective cooling of gas turbine combustor liners, combustor transition pieces, turbine vanes (nozzles), and blades (buckets) is a critical task to protect these components from the flue gas at extremely high temperature. Air film cooling has been successfully used to cool these hot sections for the past half century. However, the net benefits from the traditional methods seem to be incremental, but the temperature of working gas is continuously increasing to achieve high thermal efficiency. Therefore, new cooling techniques need to be developed. One of the promising techniques is to enhance film cooling with mist injection. While the previous study reported the effect of mist on the cooling effectiveness with an adiabatic wall, this paper focuses on the effect of mist injection on heat transfer of film cooling with a nonadiabatic flat wall, using the commercial computational fluid dynamics software package FLUENT. Both 2D and 3D cases are considered with a 2D slot and diffusive compound-angle holes. Modeling of the interaction of a droplet with a uniformly cooled wall as well as conjugate heat conduction inside the solid base are conducted. Different mist droplet sizes and mist concentrations are adopted. Conditions both in a gas turbine operating environment (15 atm and 1561 K) and in a laboratory environment (1 atm and 450 K) are considered. Results show that injecting 2–10% mist reduces the heat transfer coefficient and the wall temperature. Especially, mist has the prolonged effect of cooling the region downstream for 15 jet hole diameters, where conventional air film cooling is not effective.

Author(s):  
Oguz Uzol ◽  
Cengiz Camci

A new concept for enhanced turbulent transport of heat in internal coolant passages of gas turbine blades is introduced. The new heat transfer augmentation component called “oscillator fin” is based on an unsteady flow system using the interaction of multiple unsteady jets and wakes generated downstream of a fluidic oscillator. Incompressible, unsteady and two dimensional solutions of Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations are obtained both for an oscillator fin and for an equivalent cylindrical pin fin and the results are compared. Preliminary results show that a significant increase in the turbulent kinetic energy level occur in the wake region of the oscillator fin with respect to the cylinder with similar level of aerodynamic penalty. The new concept does not require additional components or power to sustain its oscillations and its manufacturing is as easy as a conventional pin fin. The present study makes use of an unsteady numerical simulation of mass, momentum, turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation rate conservation equations for flow visualization downstream of the new oscillator fin and an equivalent cylinder. Relative enhancements of turbulent kinetic energy and comparisons of the total pressure field from transient simulations qualitatively suggest that the oscillator fin has excellent potential in enhancing local heat transfer in internal cooling passages without significant aerodynamic penalty.


Author(s):  
R. W. Ainsworth ◽  
T. V. Jones

Internal convection cooling of turbine blades and nozzle guide vanes in jet engines is a method used to prolong the life of those components, which are subjected to very high temperature flows from the engine’s combustion chambers. The cooling is effected by passing cold gas through the internal coolant passages situated in the core of the components, the shape of these passages in many cases being simple duct geometries. Experiments are described in which transient techniques were used in an Internal Flow Facility to measure the flow property variation and heat transfer in various geometries simulating typical internal coolant passages, at conditions representative of those found in engines. Results obtained from the three geometries studied (circular, rectangular, and triangular ducts) are compared with existing experimental data and an integral-approach theoretical prediction. In addition, flow in the circular duct with mass removal representing film cooling mass flow was also studied experimentally, and these results are compared with theoretical predictions.


Author(s):  
Arash Saidi ◽  
Bengt Sundén

Internal cooling channels are commonly used to reduce the thermal loads on the gas turbine blades to improve overall efficiency. In this study a numerical investigation has been carried out to provide a validated and consistent method to deal with the prediction of the fluid flow and the heat transfer of such channels with square cross sections. The rotation modified Navier-Stokes and energy equations together with a low-Re number version of the k-ε turbulence model are solved with appropriate boundary conditions. The solution procedure is based on a numerical method using a collocated grid, and the pressure-velocity coupling is handled by the SIMPLEC algorithm. The computations are performed with the assumption of fully developed periodic conditions. The calculations are carried out for smooth ducts with and without rotation and effects of rotation on the heat transfer are described. Similar numerical calculations have carried out for channels with rib-roughened walls. The obtained results are compared with available experimental data and empirical correlations for the heat transfer rate and the friction factor. Some details of the flow and heat transfer fields are also presented.


Author(s):  
Shinjan Ghosh ◽  
Jayanta S. Kapat

Abstract Gas Turbine blade cooling is an important topic of research, as a high turbine inlet temperature (TIT) essentially means an increase in efficiency of gas turbine cycles. Internal cooling channels in gas turbine blades are key to the cooling and prevention of thermal failure of the material. Serpentine channels are a common feature in internal blade cooling. Optimization methods are often employed in the design of blade internal cooling channels to improve heat-transfer and reduce pressure drop. Topology optimization uses a variable porosity approach to manipulate flow geometries by adding or removing material. Such a method has been employed in the current work to modify the geometric configuration of a serpentine channel to improve total heat transferred and reduce the pressure drop. An in-house OpenFOAM solver has been used to create non-traditional geometries from two generic designs. Geometry-1 is a 2-D serpentine passage with an inlet and 4 bleeding holes as outlets for ejection into the trailing edge. Geometry-2 is a 3-D serpentine passage with an aspect ratio of 3:1 and consists of two 180-degree bends. The inlet velocity for both the geometries was used as 20 m/s. The governing equations employ a “Brinkman porosity parameter” to account for the porous cells in the flow domain. Results have shown a change in shape of the channel walls to enhance heat-transfer in the passage. Additive manufacturing can be employed to make such unconventional shapes.


Author(s):  
Ting Wang ◽  
Xianchang Li

Air film cooling has been successfully used to cool gas turbine hot sections for the last half century. A promising technology is proposed to enhance air film cooling with water mist injection. Numerical simulations have shown that injecting a small amount of water droplets into the cooling air improves film-cooling performance significantly. However, previous studies were conducted at conditions of low Reynolds number, temperature, and pressure to allow comparisons with experimental data. As a continuous effort to develop a realistic mist film cooling scheme, this paper focuses on simulating mist film cooling under typical gas turbine operating conditions of high temperature and pressure. The mainstream flow is at 15 atm with a temperature of 1561K. Both 2-D and 3-D cases are considered with different hole geometries on a flat surface, including a 2-D slot, a simple round hole, a compound-angle hole, and fan-shaped holes. The results show that 10%–20% mist (based on the coolant mass flow rate) achieves 5%–10% cooling enhancement and provides an additional 30–68K adiabatic wall temperature reduction. Uniform droplets of 5 to 20 μm are used. The droplet trajectories indicate the droplets tend to move away from the wall, which results in a lower cooling enhancement than under low pressure and temperature conditions. The commercial software Fluent (v. 6.2.16) is adopted in this study, and the standard k-ε model with enhanced wall treatment is adopted as the turbulence model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdel Rahman Salem ◽  
Farah Nazifa Nourin ◽  
Mohammed Abousabae ◽  
Ryoichi S. Amano

Abstract Internal cooling of gas turbine blades is performed with the combination of impingement cooling and serpentine channels. Besides gas turbine blades, the other turbine components such as turbine guide vanes, rotor disks, and combustor wall can be cooled using jet impingement cooling. This study is focused on jet impingement cooling, in order to optimize the coolant flow, and provide the maximum amount of cooling using the minimum amount of coolant. The study compares between different nozzle configurations (in-line and staggered), two different Reynold's numbers (1500 and 2000), and different stand-off distances (Z/D) both experimentally and numerically. The Z/D considered are 3, 5, and 8. In jet impingement cooling, the jet of fluid strikes perpendicular to the target surface to be cooled with high velocity to dissipate the heat. The target surface is heated up by a direct current (DC) power source. The experimental results are obtained by means of thermal image processing of the captured infra-red (IR) thermal images of the target surface. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis were employed to predict the complex heat transfer and flow phenomena, primarily the line-averaged and area-averaged Nusselt number and the cross-flow effects. In the current investigation, the flow is confined along with the nozzle plate and two parallel surfaces forming a bi-directional channel (bi-directional exit). The results show a comparison between heat transfer enhancement with in-line and staggered nozzle arrays. It is observed that the peaks of the line-averaged Nusselt number (Nu) become less as the stand-off distance (Z/D) increases. It is also observed that the fluctuations in the stagnation heat transfer are caused by the impingement of the primary vortices originating from the jet nozzle exit.


Author(s):  
M. Eifel ◽  
V. Caspary ◽  
H. Ho¨nen ◽  
P. Jeschke

This paper presents the effects of major geometrical modifications to the interior of a convection cooled gas turbine rotor blade. The analysis of the flow is performed experimentally with flow visualization via paint injection into water whereas the flow and the heat transfer are investigated numerically with Ansys CFX utilizing the SST turbulence model. Two sets of calculations are carried out, one under the same conditions as the experiments and another according to realistic hot gas conditions with conjugate heat transfer. The aim is to identify flow phenomena altering the heat transfer in the blade and to manipulate them in order to reduce the thermal load of the material. The operating point of the geometric base configuration is set to Re = 50,000 at the inlet while for the modified geometries the pressure ratio is held constant compared to the base. Flow structures and heat transfer conditions are evaluated and are linked to specific geometric features. Among several investigated configurations one could be identified that leads to a cooling effectiveness 15% larger compared to the base.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Faisal Shaikh ◽  
Budimir Rosic

Abstract Gas turbine blades and vanes are typically manufactured with small clearances between adjacent vane and blade platforms, termed the midpassage gap. The midpassage gap reduces turbine efficiency and causes additional heat load into the vane platform, as well as changing the distribution of endwall heat transfer and film cooling. This paper presents a low-order analytical analysis to quantify the effects of the midpassage gap on aerodynamics and heat transfer, verified against an experimental campaign and CFD. Using this model, the effects of the gap can be quantified, for a generic turbine stage, based only on geometric features and the passage static pressure field. It is found that at present there are significant losses and a large proportion of heat load caused by the gap, but that with modified design this could be reduced to negligible levels. Cooling flows into the gap to prevent ingression are investigated analytically and with CFD. Recommendations are given for targets that turbine designers should work toward in reducing the adverse effects of the midpassage gap. A method to estimate the effect of gap flow is presented, so that for any machine the significance of the gap may be assessed.


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