Abstract

Advanced cooling techniques are essential for further improvement in the efficiency and the power output of gas turbines. Turbine inlet temperatures of 1900 K are typical of current gas turbines, and there is an interest in increasing the temperatures for the next generation of gas turbine engines. Over the past decades, significant effort has been devoted to increase the turbine efficiency and to develop effective cooling strategies to maintain the blade temperature below the melting point of the alloys used to construct the airfoils. As a result, various cooling strategies have been developed such as film, impingement, and muti-pass cooling for the blades, and evaporative cooling for the inlet air. In this work, a state-of-the-art thermal turbomachinery test rig was designed and constructed to investigate the film-cooling performance of advanced film cooling schemes over a flat plate. Designing and constructing mechanical parts, as well developing software codes (Labview and image processing) for transient film cooling measurement was the foremost part of the current experimental work. The thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) technique was used to measure wall surface temperature. A circular film hole was used to validate the current experimental technique and methodology. The validation results showed that the current experimental technique and methodology were deemed reliable. Subsequently, the film cooling performance of the louver and new hybrid schemes were investigated, experimentally. The louver scheme was proposed by Pratt and Whitney Canada (PWC) to allow the cooling flow to pass through a bend and to encroach an airfoil material (impingement effect), then exit to the outer surface of the airfoil through a designed film hole. Immarigeon and Hassan (2006) then Zhang and Hassan (2006) numerically investigated the film cooling effectiveness performance of the louver scheme. The hybrid scheme was proposed in the current study, which includes two consecutive film hole configurations with interior bending. The cooling performances for the two advanced schemes have been analyzed experimentally over a flat plate across blowing ratios of 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 at a density ratio of 0.94. The results showed that the louver and the hybrid schemes enhanced the local and the average film cooling performance in terms of film cooling effectiveness, and the net heat flux reductions are better than other published film hole configurations. In addition, both schemes provided an extensively wide spray of 'secondary flow over the outer surface, and thus enhanced the lateral film cooling performance over the downstream surface area. Moreover, the two schemes produced an average heat transfer coefficient ratio near unity at low and high blowing ratios. As a result, the louver and the hybrid schemes are expected to reduce the temperature of the outer surface of the gas turbine airfoil and to provide superior cooling performance, which increases airfoil lifetime. In addition, the adiabatic film cooling performance and flow characteristics for the hybrid scheme were investigated numerically. The numerical investigation was analyzed across blowing ratio, of 0.5, 1, and 2. The flow structures of the hybrid scheme are presented at different blowing ratios to provide a better physical understanding. The results showed that the hybrid scheme directed the secondary flow in the horizontal direction and reduced the jet liftoff at different blowing ratios. Finally, conjugate heat transfer (CHT) and film-cooling analyses were performed to investigate the hybrid scheme performance with different flow configurations. Different geometries of parallel flow and jet impingement with different gap heights as well as the adiabatic case study were investigated at blowing ratios of 0.5 and 1.0. The results showed that the adiabatic case provided downstream centerline superlative cooling performance near the hybrid film hole exit compared to other conjugate geometries studied. At the downstream location, the impingement configuration with a large gap height provided the highest downstream performance at blowing ratio of 0.5 and 1.0 with respect to other cases studied. Moreover, the downstream film cooling performance was enhanced far along the spanwise direction for the CHT cases studied and it has the highest value near the scheme exit for parallel configuration. In addition, the impingement configuration enhanced the upper stream cooling performance compared to parallel flow and it was further enhanced for large gap heights. Keywords: film cooling effectiveness, heat transfer coefficient ratio, louver, hybrid, TLC, NHFR, CHT