Film Cooling Performance Improvement With Optimized Hole Arrangements on Pressure Side Surface of Nozzle Guide Vane: Part II — Experimental Validation
In the present study, the optimized configurations of film cooled turbine guide vanes proposed in Part I were validated experimentally and the effect of coolant mass flow rate on the performance was examined for those optimized configurations. A set of tests were conducted using an annular sector transonic turbine cascade test facility in Korea Aerospace Research Institute. The mainstream and the secondary air for cooling are supplied by 500 hp and 50 hp compressors, respectively, and the mainstream was heated approximately 20°C above the secondary flow by 300kW heater. To measure the film cooling effectiveness on the pressure side surface, the transient measurement method was used using a FLIR infrared camera system. The test section has five nozzle guide vanes with four passages. The three times scaled-up vane model is manufactured by a stereolithography method. The tests were conducted at mainstream exit Reynolds number based on the chord of 2.2×106 and the coolant mass flow rate ranging from 5 to 13% of the mainstream. The flow periodicity in the cascade passage was verified by surface static pressure measurements. The results showed that the optimized cases present better cooling effectiveness values in the overall region. The effect of coolant mass flow rate also presents the same trend. Comparison with the CFD results shows that the CFD results over-predict film cooling effectiveness by 10∼20 percentage points for baseline and 17∼23 percentage points for the optimized cases. This is probably partly due to the discrepancy of operating conditions such as inlet boundary condition and density ratio and partly due to the limitation of numerical method used in the optimization such as coarse grid near the surface. However, a quite good agreement is obtained qualitatively, which means the optimization process can be utilized as a reliable and efficient method for film cooling performance improvement.