Effects of Internal and Film Cooling on the Overall Effectiveness of a Fully Cooled Turbine Airfoil With Shaped Holes

Author(s):  
Kyle Chavez ◽  
Thomas N. Slavens ◽  
David Bogard

Adiabatic and overall effectiveness levels were measured in a closed loop linear test section using an inlet Reynolds number of 120,000 for an airfoil model at its designed inlet angle of −30.1°. Two models were used in the study — one made of a low thermal conductivity foam, and one of a higher thermal conductivity material which allowed for the Biot number of the second model to match that of the engine component. Since the ratio of the external to internal heat transfer coefficients were also matched to the engine component, the second model was thermally scaled to the actual engine component, allowing for the measurement of the overall effectiveness of the airfoil. The effects of the internal and film cooling on the overall effectiveness were examined in detail. The cooling configuration consisted of 9 rows of shaped holes, with 5 rows of conical shaped holes at the leading edge, one laidback fan-shaped gill-row, and three laidback fan-shaped holes positioned farther downstream. Furthermore, the model contained three internal coolant passages including an impingement cavity and a serpentine passage. The internal passages were lined with internal rib turbulators to enhance the internal heat transfer coefficient. This study had two main goals. First, assess the performance of a fully-cooled airfoil with shaped holes through measurements of adiabatic, internal, and overall effectiveness levels. Second, examine the effects of shaped holes and the utilization of a conduction correction on the capability to predict overall effectiveness with a simple 1D model. It was found that although the large spacing of the holes in the showerhead region produced low adiabatic effectiveness levels, the through-hole convection and impingement provided adequate levels of cooling, resulting in relatively uniform overall effectiveness levels. It was also found that although the shaped film-cooling holes have a significant effect on the 3D conduction throughout the model, the overall effectiveness is still well predicted between rows of holes, but only when a significant conduction correction to the adiabatic effectiveness data is applied. This study highlights the necessity of applied conduction corrections to adiabatic effectiveness data collected with IR thermography, highlights the use of shaped holes in the showerhead region, and confirms the utility of 1D predictive models for overall effectiveness, even for models utilizing shaped holes.

Author(s):  
Jason E. Albert ◽  
David G. Bogard ◽  
Frank Cunha

Laboratory studies of film cooling performance for turbine section airfoils typically quantify adiabatic effectiveness and occasionally the heat transfer coefficient for the film cooling configuration. In this study the normalized airfoil metal surface temperatures are obtained directly by using a test model that has a material conductivity scaled to the external and internal heat transfer coefficients so that the Biot number for the model is similar to that for the actual airfoil. These results provide an experimental test case of the conjugate heat transfer involved in turbine airfoil cooling. In this study, conventional adiabatic effectiveness and the overall cooling effectiveness (normalized surface temperature for the matched Biot model) were measured for a generic blade leading edge using three rows of shaped holes. Distinct differences were found between the adiabatic effectiveness and overall cooling effectiveness. Also included is a practical application of this experimental method for which the degradation of overall cooling effectiveness due to a plugged cooling hole is examined.


Author(s):  
Nirm V. Nirmalan ◽  
Ronald S. Bunker ◽  
Carl R. Hedlung

A new method has been developed and demonstrated for the non-destructive, quantitative assessment of internal heat transfer coefficient distributions of cooled metallic turbine airfoils. The technique employs the acquisition of full-surface external surface temperature data in response to a thermal transient induced by internal heating/cooling, in conjunction with knowledge of the part wall thickness and geometry, material properties, and internal fluid temperatures. An imaging Infrared camera system is used to record the complete time history of the external surface temperature response during a transient initiated by the introduction of a convecting fluid through the cooling circuit of the part. The transient data obtained is combined with the cooling fluid network model to provide the boundary conditions for a finite element model representing the complete part geometry. A simple 1D lumped thermal capacitance model for each local wall position is used to provide a first estimate of the internal surface heat transfer coefficient distribution. A 3D inverse transient conduction model of the part is then executed with updated internal heat transfer coefficients until convergence is reached with the experimentally measured external wall temperatures as a function of time. This new technique makes possible the accurate quantification of full-surface internal heat transfer coefficient distributions for prototype and production metallic airfoils in a totally non-destructive and non-intrusive manner. The technique is equally applicable to other material types and other cooled/heated components.


Author(s):  
Mingfei Li ◽  
Xueying Li ◽  
Jing Ren ◽  
Hongde Jiang

The cooling system is required to ensure gas turbine can work at high temperature, which has exceeded the material limitation. An endwall cooling test rig was built up to conduct the endwall cooling research. A detailed work was done for analyzing characteristics of endwall heat transfer and discussing the multi-parameter influence mechanism of overall cooling effectiveness. The main flow side heat transfer coefficient, adiabatic film cooling effectiveness and overall cooling effectiveness were measured in the experiments. The effects of coolant mass flowrate ratio (MFR) were considered through the measurement. In order to analyze how each of the parameters works on overall cooling effectiveness, a one-dimensional correlation was developed. The results showed that obvious enhancement could be found in cooling effectiveness by increasing coolant MFR, and the film jet can be easily attached to the surface after the acceleration of the main flow in the nozzle channel. Comparing with film cooling effectiveness, overall cooling effectiveness distribution is more uniform, which is due to the influence of internal cooling. The verified one-dimensional analysis method showed that the improvement in film cooling would be most efficient to heighten overall cooling effectiveness. The improvement in film cooling would be more efficient when film cooling effectiveness is in high level than in low level. However, the enhancement of internal heat transfer is more efficient when internal heat transfer coefficient is low.


Author(s):  
Carol E. Bryant ◽  
Connor J. Wiese ◽  
James L. Rutledge ◽  
Marc D. Polanka

Gas turbine hot gas path components are protected through a combination of internal cooling and external film cooling. The coolant typically travels through internal passageways, which may involve impingement on the internal surface of a turbine component, before being ejected as film cooling. Internal cooling effects have been studied in facilities that allow measurement of heat transfer coefficients within models of the internal cooling paths, with large heat transfer coefficients generally desirable. External film cooling is typically evaluated through measurements of the adiabatic effectiveness and its effect on the external heat transfer coefficient. Efforts aimed at improving cooling are often focused on either only the internal cooling or the film cooling; however, the common coolant flow means the internal and external cooling schemes are linked and the coolant holes themselves provide another convective path for heat transfer to the coolant. Recently, measurements of overall cooling effectiveness using matched Biot number turbine component models allow evaluation of the nondimensional wall temperature achieved for the fully cooled component. However, the relative contributions of internal cooling, external cooling, and convection within the film cooling holes is not well understood. Large scale, matched Biot number experiments, complemented by CFD simulations, were performed on a fully film cooled cylindrical leading edge model to evaluate the effects of various alterations in the cooling design on the overall effectiveness. The relative influence of film cooling and cooling within the holes was evaluated by selectively disabling individual holes and quantifying how the overall effectiveness changed. Several internal impingement cooling schemes in addition to a baseline case without impingement cooling were also tested. In general, impingement cooling is shown to have a negligible influence on the overall effectiveness in the showerhead region. This indicates that the cost and pressure drop penalties for implementing impingement cooling may not be compensated by an increase in thermal performance. Instead, the internal cooling provided by convection within the holes themselves was shown, along with external film cooling, to be a dominant contribution to the overall cooling effectiveness. Indeed, the numerous holes within the showerhead region impede the ability of internal surface cooling schemes to influence the outside surface temperature. The results of this research may allow improved focus of future efforts on the forms of cooling with the greatest potential to improve cooling performance.


Author(s):  
J. Kruekels ◽  
S. Naik ◽  
A. Lerch ◽  
A. Sedlov

The trailing edge sections of gas turbine vanes and blades are generally subjected to extremely high heat loads due to the combined effects of high external accelerating Mach numbers and gas temperatures. In order to maintain the metal temperatures of these trailing edges to a level, which fulfills the mechanical integrity of the parts, highly efficient cooling of the trailing edges is required without increasing the coolant consumption, as the latter has a detrimental effect on the overall gas turbine performance. In this paper the characteristics of the heat transfer and pressure drop of two novel integrated pin bank configurations were investigated. These include a pin bank with conical pins and a pin bank consisting of cylindrical pins and intersecting broken turbulators. As baseline case, a pin bank with cylindrical pins was studied as well. All investigations were done in a converging channel in order to be consistent with the real part. The heat transfer and pressure drop of all the pin banks were investigated initially with the use of numerical predictions and subsequently in a scaled experimental wind tunnel. The experimental study was conducted for a range of operational Reynolds numbers. The TLC (thermochromic liquid crystal) method was used to measure the detailed heat transfer coefficients in scaled Perspex models representing the various pin bank configurations. Pressure taps were located at several positions within the test sections. Both local and average heat transfer coefficients and pressure loss coefficients were determined. The measured and predicted results showed that the local internal heat transfer coefficient increases in the flow direction. This was due to the flow acceleration in the converging channel. Furthermore, both the broken ribs and the conical pin banks resulted in higher heat transfer coefficients compared with the baseline cylindrical pins. The conical pins produced the highest average internal heat transfer coefficients in contrast to the pins with the broken ribs, though this was also associated with a higher pressure drop.


Author(s):  
B. Glezer ◽  
H. K. Moon ◽  
T. O’Connell

Development of an adequate air cooling system for the thermally highly loaded leading edge and tip of the blade, that is cost effective and also relatively insensitive to manufacturing tolerances and operating environment continues to be one of the major challenges in advanced gas turbine design. Extensive studies on the convective (including impingement) and film cooling techniques produced remarkable progress in achieving a high cooling effectiveness level for turbine airfoils. However, in the case of turbine blades, application of these techniques has severe limitations. Highly effective impingement cooling needs to be combined with film discharge of the spent air to avoid a negative impact of crossflow on internal heat transfer and also provide additional thermal protection of the surface downstream of the discharge holes. Noticeable aerodynamic penalties, stress concentration and significant increase in manufacturing cost limit application of blade film cooling, particularly for moderately high operating temperatures. Search for a highly effective robust design of internal airfoil cooling which can delay the use of film cooling resulted in the creation of a new technique which is described in this paper. This technique is based on generation of a swirling flow structure in the blade internal leading edge passage. Significant heat transfer augmentation can be achieved when the cooling air is delivered into the leading edge plenum tangentially to the inner concave surface. The best results can be obtained when the swirling flow is allowed to move radially, creating a three-dimensional screw-shaped flow in the plenum. The presented results of the flow and heat transfer studies performed for the practical range of Reynolds numbers for the internal flow show that the leading edge screw-shaped cooling technique provides internal heat transfer rate comparable with impingement coupled with film discharge of the spent air, is more effective than impingement with cross flow and is almost five times higher than heat transfer in the smooth channel.


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