Experimental Study on Pressure Losses in Circular Orifices for the Application in Internal Cooling Systems

2014 ◽  
Vol 137 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Binder ◽  
Mats Kinell ◽  
Esa Utriainen ◽  
Daniel Eriksson ◽  
Mehdi Bahador ◽  
...  

The cooling air flow in a gas turbine is governed by the flow through its internal passages and controlled by restrictors such as circular orifices. If the cooling air flow is incorrectly controlled, the durability and mechanical integrity of the whole turbine may be affected. Consequently, a good understanding of the orifices in the internal passages is important. This study presents experimental results for a range of pressure ratios and length-to-diameter ratios common in gas turbines including even very small pressure ratios. Additionally, the chamfer depth at the inlet was also varied. The results of the chamfer depth variation confirmed its beneficial influence on decreasing pressure losses. Moreover, important effects were noted when varying more than one parameter at a time. Besides earlier mentioned hysteresis at the threshold of choking, new phenomena were observed, e.g., a rise of the discharge coefficient for certain pressure and length-to-diameter ratios. A correlation for the discharge coefficient was attained based on the new experimental data with a generally lower error than previous studies.

Author(s):  
Christian Binder ◽  
Mats Kinell ◽  
Esa Utriainen ◽  
Daniel Eriksson ◽  
Mehdi Bahador ◽  
...  

The cooling air flow in a gas turbine is governed by the flow through its internal passages and controlled by restrictors such as circular orifices. If the cooling air flow is incorrectly controlled, the durability and mechanical integrity of the whole turbine may be affected. Consequently, a good understanding of the orifices in the internal passages is important. This study presents experimental results for a range of pressure ratios and length-to-diameter ratios common in gas turbines including even very small pressure ratios. Additionally, the chamfer depth at the inlet was also varied. The results of the chamfer depth variation confirmed its beneficial influence on decreasing pressure losses. Moreover, important effects were noted when varying more than one parameter at a time. Besides earlier mentioned hysteresis at the threshold of choking, new phenomena were observed, e.g. a rise of the discharge coefficient for certain pressure and length-to-diameter ratios. A correlation for the discharge coefficient was attained based on the new experimental data with a generally lower error than previous studies.


Author(s):  
D. Brillert ◽  
H. J. Dohmen ◽  
F.-K. Benra ◽  
O. Schneider ◽  
A. V. Mirzamoghadam

Continuous improvements of the secondary air system are basic elements to increase efficiency and power of heavy duty gas turbines. It is becoming more important to perform a precise calculation of the heat transfer characteristics and to produce accurate predictions of the air/metal temperature in the internal cooling air system. Thermal effects influences the cooling behavior and consequently the cooling efficiency and the material temperature. The material temperature influences the stresses and the creep behavior that is important for life prediction and the reliability of the engine. Furthermore, the material temperature influences the clearances and therefore, the cooling mass-flow. This paper deals with a complex internal blade feed system comprising a forced radially-inward jet-flow into a large rotating cavity and the numerical coupling of different cooling air flow passages with component heat transfer, i.e. conjugate CFD. A calculation procedure was adopted to reproduce the measured rotating main shaft temperatures from the Siemens Model V84.3A gas turbine prototype. Based on this procedure, flow and heat transfer throughout the sub-cavities were discussed and the shaft temperature distribution was obtained. Results indicate a strong interaction between the thermal effects of the cooler radial jet-flow and the hotter seal gap regions. Moreover, the deficiencies in the adopted calculation procedure were identified.


Author(s):  
Tianyi Gao ◽  
James Geer ◽  
Bahgat G. Sammakia ◽  
Russell Tipton ◽  
Mark Seymour

Cooling power constitutes a large portion of the total electrical power consumption in data centers. Approximately 25%∼40% of the electricity used within a production data center is consumed by the cooling system. Improving the cooling energy efficiency has attracted a great deal of research attention. Many strategies have been proposed for cutting the data center energy costs. One of the effective strategies for increasing the cooling efficiency is using dynamic thermal management. Another effective strategy is placing cooling devices (heat exchangers) closer to the source of heat. This is the basic design principle of many hybrid cooling systems and liquid cooling systems for data centers. Dynamic thermal management of data centers is a huge challenge, due to the fact that data centers are operated under complex dynamic conditions, even during normal operating conditions. In addition, hybrid cooling systems for data centers introduce additional localized cooling devices, such as in row cooling units and overhead coolers, which significantly increase the complexity of dynamic thermal management. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to characterize the dynamic responses of data centers under variations from different cooling units, such as cooling air flow rate variations. In this study, a detailed computational analysis of an in row cooler based hybrid cooled data center is conducted using a commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. A representative CFD model for a raised floor data center with cold aisle-hot aisle arrangement fashion is developed. The hybrid cooling system is designed using perimeter CRAH units and localized in row cooling units. The CRAH unit supplies centralized cooling air to the under floor plenum, and the cooling air enters the cold aisle through perforated tiles. The in row cooling unit is located on the raised floor between the server racks. It supplies the cooling air directly to the cold aisle, and intakes hot air from the back of the racks (hot aisle). Therefore, two different cooling air sources are supplied to the cold aisle, but the ways they are delivered to the cold aisle are different. Several modeling cases are designed to study the transient effects of variations in the flow rates of the two cooling air sources. The server power and the cooling air flow variation combination scenarios are also modeled and studied. The detailed impacts of each modeling case on the rack inlet air temperature and cold aisle air flow distribution are studied. The results presented in this work provide an understanding of the effects of air flow variations on the thermal performance of data centers. The results and corresponding analysis is used for improving the running efficiency of this type of raised floor hybrid data centers using CRAH and IRC units.


Author(s):  
Liu Jian Jun

An analytical study was undertaken using the performance model of a two spool direct drive high BPR 300kN thrust turbofan engine, to investigate the effects of advanced configurations on overall engine performance. These include variable bypass nozzle, variable cooling air flow and more electric technique. For variable bypass nozzle, analysis on performance of outer fan at different conditions indicates that different operating points cannot meet optimal performance at the same time if the bypass nozzle area kept a constant. By changing bypass nozzle throat area at different states, outer fan operating point moves to the location where airflow and efficiency are more appropriate, and have enough margin away from surge line. As a result, the range of variable area of bypass nozzle throat is determined which ensures engine having a low SFC and adequate stability. For variable cooling airflow, configuration of turbine cooling air flow extraction and methodology for obtaining change of cooling airflow are investigated. Then, base on temperature analysis of turbine vane and blade and resistance of cooling airflow, reduction of cooling airflow is determined. Finally, using performance model which considering effect of cooling air flow on work and efficiency of turbine, variable cooling airflow effect on overall performance is analyzed. For more electric technique, the main characteristic is to use power off-take instead of overboard air extraction. Power off-take and air extraction effect on overall performance of high bypass turbofan engine is compared. Investigation demonstrates that power offtake will have less SFC.


Author(s):  
Karsten Kusterer ◽  
Nurettin Tekin ◽  
Frederieke Reiners ◽  
Dieter Bohn ◽  
Takao Sugimoto ◽  
...  

In modern gas turbines, the film cooling technology is essential for the protection of the hot parts, in particular of the first stage vanes and blades of the turbine, against the hot gases from the combustion process in order to reach an acceptable life span of the components. As the cooling air is usually extracted from the compressor, the reduction of the cooling effort would directly result to an increased thermal efficiency of the gas turbine. Understanding of the fundamental physics of film cooling is necessary for the improvement of the state-of-the-art. Thus, huge research efforts by industry as well as research organizations have been undertaken to establish high efficient film cooling technologies. It is a today common knowledge that film cooling effectiveness degradation is caused by secondary flows inside the cooling jets, i.e. the Counter-Rotating Vortices (CRV) or sometimes also mentioned as kidney-vortices, which induce a lift-off of the jet. Further understanding of the secondary flow development inside the jet and how this could be influenced, has led to hole configurations, which can induce Anti-Counter-Rotating Vortices (ACRV) in the cooling jets. As a result, the cooling air remains close to the wall and is additionally distributed flatly along the surface. Beside different other technologies, the NEKOMIMI cooling technology is a promising approach to establish the desired ACRV. It consists of a combination of two holes in just one configuration so that the air is distributed mainly on two cooling air streaks following the special shape of the generated geometry. The original configuration was found to be difficult for manufacturing even by advanced manufacturing processes. Thus, the improvement of this configuration has been reached by a set of geometry parameters, which lead to configurations much easier to be manufactured but preserving the principle of the NEKOMIMI technology. Within a numerical parametric study several advanced configurations have been obtained and investigated under ambient air flow conditions similar to conditions for a wind tunnel test rig. By systematic variation of the parameters a further optimization with respect to highest film cooling effectiveness has been performed. A set of most promising configurations has been also investigated experimentally in the test rig. The best configuration outperforms the basic configuration by 17% regarding the overall averaged adiabatic film cooling effectiveness under the experimental conditions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document