scholarly journals Ramp Heating in High-Speed Transient Thermal Measurement With Reduced Uncertainty

Author(s):  
H. Ma ◽  
Z. Wang ◽  
L. Wang ◽  
Q. Zhang ◽  
Z. Yang ◽  
...  

The uncertainty associated with the convective heat transfer coefficient (HTC) obtained in transient thermal measurement is often high, especially in high speed flow. The present study demonstrates that the experimental accuracy could be much improved by an actively controlled ramp heating instead of the conventional step heating approach. A general design guideline for the proposed ramp heating method is derived theoretically and further demonstrated by simulation cases. This paper also presents a detailed experimental study for transonic turbine blade tip heat transfer. Repeatable, high-resolution tip HTC contour was obtained through transient IR measurement with the proposed ramp heating method. Detailed uncertainty analysis shows that the resulting HTC uncertainty level is much lower than the experimental data currently available in the open literature. The ramp heating approach is specially recommended to the high-speed heat transfer experimental research community to improve the accuracy of the transient thermal measurement technique.

Author(s):  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He

Currently the aerodynamics and heat transfer over a turbine blade tip tend to be analyzed separately with the assumption that the wall thermal boundary conditions do not affect the over-tip-leakage (OTL) flow field. There are some existing correlations for correcting the wall temperature effect on heat transfer when scaled to engine realistic conditions. But they were either developed to account for the temperature dependence of fluid properties largely empirically, or based on a boundary-layer model. It would be difficult (if not impossible) to define a boundary layer in many parts of a realistic blade passage with marked three-dimensional (3D) end wall and secondary flows (including those within a blade tip and around it). The questions to be asked here are: is the OTL aerodynamics significantly affected by the wall thermal condition? And if it is, how can we count this effect consistently in turbine blade tip design and analysis using modern CFD methods? In the present study the problem has been examined for typical high-pressure turbine blade tip configurations. An extensively developed RANS code (HYDRA) is employed and validated against the experimental data from a high speed linear cascade testing rig. The numerical analysis reveals that the wall–gas temperature ratio could greatly affect the transonic OTL flow field and there is a strong two-way coupling between aerodynamics and heat transfer. The feedbacks of the thermal boundary condition to aerodynamics behave differently at different flow regimes over the tip, clearly indicating a highly localized dependence of the convective heat transfer coefficient (HTC) upon wall temperatures. This implies that to use HTC for blade metal temperature predictions without resorting a fully conjugate solution, the temperature dependence needs to be corrected locally. A nonlinear correction approach has been adopted in the present work, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness for the transonic turbine tip configurations studied.


Author(s):  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He

Currently, the aerodynamics and heat transfer over a turbine blade tip tend to be analyzed separately with the assumption that the wall thermal boundary conditions do not affect the Over-Tip-Leakage (OTL) flow field. There are some existing correlations for correcting the wall temperature effect on heat transfer. But they were mainly developed to account for the temperature dependence on fluid properties, and are inherently limited by the empirical nature. The questions arise with regard to: is the OTL aerodynamics significantly affected by the wall thermal condition? And if it is, how can we count this effect consistently in turbine blade tip design and analysis using modern CFD methods? In the present study, the problem has been examined for typical HP turbine blade tip configurations. An extensively developed RANS code (HYDRA) is employed and validated against the experimental data from a high speed linear cascade testing rig. The numerical analysis reveals that the wall-gas temperature ratio could greatly affect the transonic OTL flow field and there is a strong two-way coupling between aerodynamics and heat transfer. The feedbacks of the thermal boundary condition to aerodynamics behave differently at different flow regimes over the tip, clearly indicating a highly localized dependence of the convective heat transfer coefficient (HTC) upon wall temperatures. This implies that to use HTC for blade metal temperature predictions without resorting a fully conjugate solution, the temperature dependence needs to be corrected locally. A nonlinear correction approach has been adopted in the present work, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness for the transonic turbine tip configurations studied.


Author(s):  
H. Ma ◽  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He ◽  
Z. Wang ◽  
L. Wang

A basic attribute for turbine blade film cooling is that coolant injected should be largely passively convected by the local base flow. However, the effective working of the conventional wisdom may be compromised when the cooling injection strongly interacts with the base flow. Rotor blade tip of a transonic high-pressure (HP) turbine is one of such challenging regions for which basic understanding of the relevant aerothermal behavior as a basis for effective heat transfer/cooling design is lacking. The need to increase our understanding and predictability for high-speed transonic blade tip has been underlined by some recent findings that tip heat transfer characteristics in a transonic flow are qualitatively different from those at a low speed. Although there have been extensive studies previously on squealer blade tip cooling, there have been no published experimental studies under a transonic flow condition. The present study investigates the effect of cooling injection on a transonic squealer tip through a closely combined experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) effort. The experimental and computational results as presented in Part I have consistently revealed some distinctive aerothermal signatures of the strong coolant-base flow interactions. In this paper, as Part II, detailed analyses using the validated CFD solutions are conducted to identify, analyze, and understand the causal links between the aerothermal signatures and the driving flow structures and physical mechanisms. It is shown that the interactions between the coolant injection and the base over-tip leakage (OTL) flow in the squealer tip region are much stronger in the frontal subsonic region than the rear transonic region. The dominant vortical flow structure is a counter-rotating vortex pair (CRVP) associated with each discrete cooling injection. High HTC stripes on the cavity floor are directly linked to the impingement heat transfer augmentation associated with one leg of the CRVP, which is considerably enhanced by the near-floor fluid movement driven by the overall pressure gradient along the camber line (CAM). The strength of the coolant-base flow interaction as signified by the augmented values of the HTC stripes is seen to correlate to the interplay and balance between the OTL flow and the CRVP structure. As such, for the frontal subsonic part of the cavity, there is a prevailing spanwise inward flow initiated by the CRVP, which has profoundly changed the local base flow, leading to high HTC stripes on the cavity floor. On the other hand, for the rear high speed part, the high inertia of the OTL flow dominates; thus, the vortical flow disturbances associated with the CRVP are largely passively convected, leaving clear signatures on the top surface of the suction surface rim. A further interesting side effect of the strong interaction in the frontal subsonic region is that there is considerable net heat flux reduction (NHFR) in an area seemingly unreachable by the injected coolant. The present results have confirmed that this is due to the large reduction in the local HTC as a consequence of the upstream propagated impact of the strong coolant-base flow interactions.


Author(s):  
Junye Li ◽  
Kan Zhou ◽  
Wei Li

Abstract An experimental investigation of subcooled flow boiling in a large width-to-height-ratio, one-sided heating rectangular mini-gap channel was conducted with deionized water as the working fluid. The super-hydrophobicity micro-porous structured copper surface was utilized in the experiments. High speed flow visualization was conducted to illustrate the effects of heat flux and mass rate on the heat transfer coefficient and flow pattern on the surfaces. The mass fluxes were in the range of 200–500 kg/m2s, the wall heat fluxes were spanned from 40–400 kW/m2. With increments of imposed heat flux, the slopes of boiling curves for superhydrophobic micro-porous copper surfaces increased rapidly, indicating the Onset of Nucleate Boiling. Heat transfer characteristics were discussed with variation of heat fluxes and mass fluxes, the trends of which were analyzed with the aid of high speed flow visualization.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Jiang ◽  
W. Chen ◽  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He

The one-dimensional (1D) conduction analytical approaches for a semi-infinite domain, widely adopted in the data processing of transient thermal experiments, can lead to large errors, especially near a corner of solid domain. The problems could be addressed by adopting 2D/3D numerical solutions (finite element analysis (FEA) or computational fluid dynamics (CFD)) of the solid field. In addition to needing the access to a conduction solver and extra computing effort, the numerical field solution based processing methods often require extra experimental efforts to obtain full thermal boundary conditions around corners. On a more fundamental note, it would be highly preferable that the experimental data processing is completely free of any numerical solutions and associated discretization errors, not least because it is often the case that the main purposes of many experimental measurements are exactly to validate the numerical solution methods themselves. In the present work, an analytical-solution based method is developed to enable the correction of the 2D conduction errors in a corner region without using any conduction solvers. The new approach is based on the recognition that a temperature time trace in a 2D corner situation is the result of the accumulated heat conductions in both the normal and lateral directions. An equivalent semi-infinite 1D conduction temperature trace for a correct heat transfer coefficient (HTC) can then be generated by reconstructing and removing the lateral conduction component at each time step. It is demonstrated that this simple correction technique enables the use of the standard 1D conduction analysis to get the correct HTC completely analytically without any aid of CFD or FEA solutions. In addition to a transient infrared (IR) thermal measurement case, two numerical test cases of practical interest with turbine blade tip heat transfer and film cooling are used for validation and demonstration. It has been consistently shown that the errors of the conventional 1D conduction analysis in the near corner regions can be greatly reduced by the new corner correction method.


Author(s):  
A. S. Virdi ◽  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He ◽  
H. D. Li ◽  
R. Hunsley

Recent work has indicated qualitatively different heat transfer characteristics between a transonic blade tip and a subsonic one. High resolution experimental data can be acquired for blade tip heat transfer research using a high speed linear cascade. While recognising an important role played by the cascade tests in validating computational models at the same conditions, some questions arise in relation to the effects of relative casing motion: 1) Does the relative casing movement change the main flow physics influencing the blade tip aerothermal performance? 2) Can a cascade set up with stationary casing wall rank different designs? 3) How do the effects of the casing motion depend on tip design configurations? A combined experimental and CFD study on several high pressure blade tip configurations is conducted to address these issues. Firstly, extensive experimental tests with aerodynamic loss and heat transfer measurement in a high speed linear cascade have been carried out for a squealer tip configuration at engine representative aerodynamic conditions. A systematic validation of the CFD solver (Rolls-Royce HYDRA) is presented, which serves as a basis for the computational analyses of the effects of the relative casing motion. Two tip configurations (squealer and flat tip) at three tip gaps (0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5% span) are analysed. The main aerodynamic impact of the casing motion is seen to promote the passage vortex, which consequently supresses the pitchwise reach of the tip leakage vortex. Inside the tip gap, the behaviour is dominated by the extra wall friction in relation of the inertia of the bulk fluid through the gap. As such, the moving casing effect is particularly strong for the flat tip at a small tip gap. For the large and medium tip gaps, both stationary and moving casing results are shown to consistently capture the trends in overall aerothermal performances. The present results confirm that even with relative casing motion, there is still a significant portion of transonic flow over a blade tip. For both the stationary and moving casing cases, the gap dependence of the over-tip heat transfer shows opposite trends for the transonic and subsonic regions respectively. The gap dependence of the blade tip heat transfer is shown to be clearly dependent on tip geometry configurations, as the bulk flow in a squealer cavity is subsonic regardless of the tip gap size, whilst the local flow state over a flat tip is much more responsive to the change of gap size.


2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
D. O. O’Dowd ◽  
Q. Zhang ◽  
L. He ◽  
M. L. G. Oldfield ◽  
P. M. Ligrani ◽  
...  

This paper presents an experimental and numerical investigation of the aerothermal performance of an uncooled winglet tip, under transonic conditions. Spatially resolved heat transfer data, including winglet tip surface and near-tip side-walls, are obtained using the transient infrared thermography technique within the Oxford high speed linear cascade test facility. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions are also conducted using the Rolls-Royce HYDRA suite. Most of the spatial heat transfer variations on the tip surface are well-captured by the CFD solver. The transonic flow pattern and its influence on heat transfer are analyzed, which shows that the turbine blade tip heat transfer is greatly influenced by the shock wave structure inside the tip gap. The effect of the casing relative motion is also numerically investigated. The CFD results indicate that the local heat transfer distribution on the tip is affected by the relative casing motion but the tip flow choking and shock wave structure within the tip gap still exist in the aft region of the blade.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document