FLOW CHECK AND ADIABATIC EFFECTIVENESS MEASUREMENTS ON TRADITIONALLY VERSUS ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED FILM-COOLING HOLES

In the recent years Additive Manufacturing (AM) methods are getting more and more attractive and feasible for the realization of components and subcomponents of gas turbines. They are receiving much attention since, on one hand, the manufacturing of complex 3D geometries is allowed and, on the other, manufacturing and delivery times can be cut down. At the current state of the art, to the authors' knowledge only few applications have yet been commercialized relatively to cooling holes, due to the intrinsic difficulties associated with such a critical feature. Lately, Baker Hughes is studying the possibility to manufacture film-cooling holes via the DMLM technology in order to exploit the flexibility of such innovative manufacturing method and hence eliminate additional processes and lead time. From the open literature it is known that additively manufactured holes can have a more irregular shape and higher roughness than traditional ones, which may lead not only to a reduction in coolant flow but more importantly to a decay of the film-cooling adiabatic effectiveness. For this reason, a test campaign has been conducted in collaboration with the University of Florence (Italy) with the objective of characterizing the performance (minimum passage diameter, flow check and adiabatic effectiveness) of AM vs traditional cylindrical holes on simple-geometry coupons built upon different construction angles. Results were then analyzed in order to fully compare the performance of AM vs traditional film-cooling holes at different operating regimes.

Numerical investigations of endwall film cooling design of a turbine vane using four-holes pattern

Purpose Endwall film cooling protects vane endwall by coolant coverage, especially at the leading edge (LE) region and vane-pressure side (PS) junction region. Strong flow impingement and complex vortexaa structures on the vane endwall cause difficulties for coolant flows to cover properly. This work aims at a full-scale arrangement of film cooling holes on the endwall which improves coolant efficiency in the LE region and vane-PS junction region. Design/methodology/approach The endwall film holes are grouped in four-holes constructal patterns. Three ways of arranging the groups are studied: based on the pressure field, the streamlines or the heat transfer field. The computational analysis is done with the k-ω SST model after validating the turbulence model properly. Findings By clustering the film cooling holes in four-holes patterns, the ejection of the coolant flow is stronger. The four-holes constructal patterns also improve the local coolant coverage in the “tough” regions, such as the junction region of the PS and the endwall. The arrangement based on streamlines distribution can effectively improve the coolant coverage and the arrangement based on the heat transfer distribution (HTD) has benefits by reducing high-temperature regions on the endwall. Originality/value A full-scale endwall film cooling design is presented considering interactions of different film cooling holes. A comprehensive model validation and mesh independence study are provided. The cooling holes pattern on the endwall is designed as four-holes constructal patterns combined with several arrangement choices, i.e. by pressure, by heat transfer and by streamline distributions.

Influence of Coolant Density on Turbine Blade Tip Film Cooling at Transonic Cascade Flow Conditions Using the Pressure Sensitive Paint Technique

This work is an experimental study of film cooling effectiveness on a blade tip in a stationary, linear cascade. The cascade is mounted in a blowdown facility with controlled inlet and exit Mach numbers of 0.29 and 0.75, respectively. The free stream turbulence intensity is measured to be 13.5 % upstream of the blade's leading edge. A flat tip design is studied, having a tip gap of 1.6%. The blade tip is designed to have 15 shaped film cooling holes along the near-tip pressure side (PS) surface. Fifteen vertical film cooling holes are placed on the tip near the pressure side. The cooling holes are divided into a 2-zone plenum to locally maintain the desired blowing ratios based on the external pressure field. Two coolant injection scenarios are considered by injecting coolant through the tip holes only and both tip and PS surface holes together. The blowing ratio (M) and density ratio (DR) effects are studied by testing at blowing ratios of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 and three density ratios of 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. Three different foreign gases are used to create density ratio effect. Over-tip flow leakage is also studied by measuring the static pressure distributions on the blade tip using the pressure sensitive paint measurement technique. In addition, detailed film cooling effectiveness and over-tip flow leakage is acquired to quantify the parametric effect of blowing ratio and density ratio on a plane tip.

IMPROVING THE FILM COOLING PERFORMANCE OF A TURBINE ENDWALL WITH MULTI-FIDELITY MODELING CONSIDERING CONJUGATE HEAT TRANSFER

The gas turbine endwall is bearing extreme thermal loads with the rapid increase of turbine inlet temperature. Therefore, the effective cooling of turbine endwalls is of vital importance for the safe operation of turbines. In the design of endwall cooling layouts, numerical simulations based on conjugate heat transfer (CHT) are drawing more attention as the component temperature can be predicted directly. However, the computation cost of high-fidelity CHT analysis can be high and even prohibitive especially when there are many cases to evaluate such as in the design optimization of cooling layout. In this study, we established a multi-fidelity framework in which the data of low-fidelity CHT analysis was incorporated to help the building of a model that predicts the result of high-fidelity simulation. Based upon this framework, multi-fidelity design optimization of a validated numerical turbine endwall model was carried out. The high and low fidelity data were obtained from the computation of fine mesh and coarse mesh respectively. In the optimization, the positions of the film cooling holes were parameterized and controlled by a shape function. With the help of multi-fidelity modeling and sequentially evaluated designs, the cooling performance of the model endwall was improved efficiently.