An experimental study was conducted to determine the heat transfer performance of advanced convective cooling techniques at the typical conditions found in a backside cooled combustion chamber. For these internal cooling channels, the Reynolds number is usually found to be above the Reynolds number range covered by available databases in the open literature. As possible candidates for an improved convective cooling configuration in terms of heat transfer augmentation and acceptable pressure drops, W-shaped and WW-shaped ribs were considered for channels with a rectangular cross section. Additionally, uniformly distributed hemispheres were investigated. Here, four different roughness spacings were studied to identify the influence on friction factors and the heat transfer enhancement. The ribs and the hemispheres were placed on one channel wall only. Pressure losses and heat transfer enhancement data for all test cases are reported. To resolve the heat transfer coefficient, a transient thermocromic liquid crystal technique was applied. Additionally, the area-averaged heat transfer coefficient on the W-shaped rib itself was observed using the so-called lumped-heat capacitance method. To gain insight into the flow field and to reveal the important flow field structures, numerical computations were conducted with the commercial code FLUENT™.
