Numerical Study of Heat Transfer in Novel Wavy Trailing Edge Design for Gas Turbine Airfoils

Author(s):  
Sarwesh Parbat ◽  
Li Yang ◽  
Minking Chyu ◽  
Sin Chien Siw ◽  
Ching-Pang Lee

Abstract The strive to achieve increasingly higher efficiencies in gas turbine power generation has led to a continued rise in the turbine inlet temperature. As a result, novel cooling approaches for gas turbine blades are necessary to maintain them within the material’s thermal mechanical performance envelope. Various internal and external cooling technologies are used in different parts of the blade airfoil to provide the desired levels of cooling. Among the different regions of the blade profile, the trailing edge (TE) presents additional cooling challenges due to the thin cross section and high thermal loads. In this study, a new wavy geometry for the TE has been proposed and analyzed using steady state numerical simulations. The wavy TE structure resembled a sinusoidal wave running along the span of the blade. The troughs on both pressure side and suction side contained the coolant exit slots. As a result, consecutive coolant exit slots provided an alternating discharge between the suction side and the pressure side of the blade. Steady state conjugate heat transfer simulations were carried out using CFX solver for four coolant to mainstream mass flow ratios of 0.45%, 1%, 1.5% and 3%. The temperature distribution and film cooling effectiveness in the TE region were compared to two conventional geometries, pressure side cutback and centerline ejection which are widely used in vanes and blades for both land-based and aviation gas turbine engines. Unstructured mesh was generated for both fluid and solid domains and interfaces were defined between the two domains. For turbulence closer, SST-kω model was used. The wall y+ was maintained < 1 by using inflation layers at all the solid fluid interfaces. The numerical results depicted that the alternating discharge from the wavy TE was able to form protective film coverage on both the pressure and suction side of the blade. As a result, significant reduction in the TE metal was observed which was up to 14% lower in volume averaged temperature in the TE region when compared to the two baseline conventional configurations.


Author(s):  
Kishore Ranganath Ramakrishnan ◽  
Prashant Singh ◽  
Srinath V. Ekkad

Gas turbine blades are subjected to elevated heat loads due to highly turbulent hot gases exiting the combustor section. Several internal and external cooling techniques are used to protect the blades from such hostile environment. Trailing edge of a turbine blade is usually cooled with array of staggered cylindrical pins, which connects the pressure and suction side internal walls and hence provide improved structural integrity. However, the heat transfer enhancement levels for array of pin-fins is generally lower than jet impingement and ribbed channels. In this study, we present a three-tier impingement cooling design for blade trailing-edge and part of mid-chord region. In this design, pressure and suction side internal walls are subjected to oblique jet impingement. Three different configurations have been studied where we have systematically varied the jet diameters and number of jets in an array for different tiers. Numerical simulations have been carried out for different flow conditions, which corresponds to Reynolds numbers (based on 1st-passage jet diameter) ranging between 3000 and 46000. First two plenums had high levels of heat transfer due to oblique jet impingement, where the suction side internal wall representative surface, had higher heat transfer compared to the pressure side internal wall. Third tier had the lowest heat transfer due to triangle-like configuration where jets were almost parallel to pressure and suction side surfaces, and hence their effectiveness was lower than the oblique jet impingement in upstream two tiers.



Author(s):  
Shinjan Ghosh ◽  
Jayanta S. Kapat

Abstract Gas Turbine blade cooling is an important topic of research, as a high turbine inlet temperature (TIT) essentially means an increase in efficiency of gas turbine cycles. Internal cooling channels in gas turbine blades are key to the cooling and prevention of thermal failure of the material. Serpentine channels are a common feature in internal blade cooling. Optimization methods are often employed in the design of blade internal cooling channels to improve heat-transfer and reduce pressure drop. Topology optimization uses a variable porosity approach to manipulate flow geometries by adding or removing material. Such a method has been employed in the current work to modify the geometric configuration of a serpentine channel to improve total heat transferred and reduce the pressure drop. An in-house OpenFOAM solver has been used to create non-traditional geometries from two generic designs. Geometry-1 is a 2-D serpentine passage with an inlet and 4 bleeding holes as outlets for ejection into the trailing edge. Geometry-2 is a 3-D serpentine passage with an aspect ratio of 3:1 and consists of two 180-degree bends. The inlet velocity for both the geometries was used as 20 m/s. The governing equations employ a “Brinkman porosity parameter” to account for the porous cells in the flow domain. Results have shown a change in shape of the channel walls to enhance heat-transfer in the passage. Additive manufacturing can be employed to make such unconventional shapes.



Author(s):  
Bo-lun Zhang ◽  
Hui-ren Zhu ◽  
Tao Guo ◽  
Chun-yi Yao ◽  
Zhong-yi Fu

Abstract The double turning areas ribbed serpentine channel with lateral outflow is an important structure for designing the internal systems of turbine blade. The current work similarly simplifies the internal channel of the real blade. The Nusselt number and pressure coefficient distribution of the double turning areas ribbed serpentine channel with different outflow ratios are numerically researched under static and rotating conditions. The Realizable k-ε turbulence model with enhanced wall treatment is used in the numerical simulation. The inlet Reynolds number is 11000. The rotation numbers vary from 0 to 0.09. Three outflow ratios are 27%/0%/73%, 27%/49%/24% and 27%/73%/0%, respectively. The rotation radius (R) is 46.4d. The result shows that the Nusselt number distribution of the passage 3 under 27%/49%/24% outflow ratio condition is similar to that under 27%/73%/0% outflow ratio condition. There is a large low Nusselt number area in the passage 3 under Dr = 27%/0%/73% condition. The averaged area Nusselt number ratios on the suction side of the passage 1, passage 2 and passage 3 are higher than that on the pressure side under nonrotating condition. Rotation enhances heat transfer on the suction side of the passage 2, and has a positive effect on pressure side heat transfer of passage 1 and passage 3. The averaged area Nusselt number ratio of passage 3 under 27%/73%/0% outflow ratio condition is higher than that under other outflow ratio conditions. With the rotation number increasing, the pressure coefficient of the complete ribbed serpentine channel gradually increases, and the maximum increase is in the first turning area.



2002 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gm Salam Azad ◽  
Je-Chin Han ◽  
Ronald S. Bunker ◽  
C. Pang Lee

This study investigates the effect of a squealer tip geometry arrangement on heat transfer coefficient and static pressure distributions on a gas turbine blade tip in a five-bladed stationary linear cascade. A transient liquid crystal technique is used to obtain detailed heat transfer coefficient distribution. The test blade is a linear model of a tip section of the GE E3 high-pressure turbine first stage rotor blade. Six tip geometry cases are studied: (1) squealer on pressure side, (2) squealer on mid camber line, (3) squealer on suction side, (4) squealer on pressure and suction sides, (5) squealer on pressure side plus mid camber line, and (6) squealer on suction side plus mid camber line. The flow condition during the blowdown tests corresponds to an overall pressure ratio of 1.32 and exit Reynolds number based on axial chord of 1.1×106. Results show that squealer geometry arrangement can change the leakage flow and results in different heat transfer coefficients to the blade tip. A squealer on suction side provides a better benefit compared to that on pressure side or mid camber line. A squealer on mid camber line performs better than that on a pressure side.



2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdel Rahman Salem ◽  
Farah Nazifa Nourin ◽  
Mohammed Abousabae ◽  
Ryoichi S. Amano

Abstract Internal cooling of gas turbine blades is performed with the combination of impingement cooling and serpentine channels. Besides gas turbine blades, the other turbine components such as turbine guide vanes, rotor disks, and combustor wall can be cooled using jet impingement cooling. This study is focused on jet impingement cooling, in order to optimize the coolant flow, and provide the maximum amount of cooling using the minimum amount of coolant. The study compares between different nozzle configurations (in-line and staggered), two different Reynold's numbers (1500 and 2000), and different stand-off distances (Z/D) both experimentally and numerically. The Z/D considered are 3, 5, and 8. In jet impingement cooling, the jet of fluid strikes perpendicular to the target surface to be cooled with high velocity to dissipate the heat. The target surface is heated up by a direct current (DC) power source. The experimental results are obtained by means of thermal image processing of the captured infra-red (IR) thermal images of the target surface. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis were employed to predict the complex heat transfer and flow phenomena, primarily the line-averaged and area-averaged Nusselt number and the cross-flow effects. In the current investigation, the flow is confined along with the nozzle plate and two parallel surfaces forming a bi-directional channel (bi-directional exit). The results show a comparison between heat transfer enhancement with in-line and staggered nozzle arrays. It is observed that the peaks of the line-averaged Nusselt number (Nu) become less as the stand-off distance (Z/D) increases. It is also observed that the fluctuations in the stagnation heat transfer are caused by the impingement of the primary vortices originating from the jet nozzle exit.





2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gm Salam Azad ◽  
Je-Chin Han ◽  
Ronald S. Bunker ◽  
C. Pang Lee

Abstract This study investigates the effect of a squealer tip geometry arrangement on heat transfer coefficient and static pressure distributions on a gas turbine blade tip in a five-bladed stationary linear cascade. A transient liquid crystal technique is used to obtain detailed heat transfer coefficient distribution. The test blade is a linear model of a tip section of the GE E3 high-pressure turbine first stage rotor blade. Six tip geometry cases are studied: 1) squealer on pressure side, 2) squealer on mid camber line, 3) squealer on suction side, 4) squealer on pressure and suction sides, 5) squealer on pressure side plus mid camber line, and 6) squealer on suction side plus mid camber line. The flow condition corresponds to an overall pressure ratio of 1.32 and exit Reynolds number based on axial chord of 1.1 × 106. Results show that squealer geometry arrangement can change the leakage flow and results in different heat transfer coefficients to the blade tip. A squealer on suction side provides a better benefit compared to that on pressure side or mid camber line. A squealer on mid camber line performs better than that on a pressure side.



Author(s):  
Ping Dong ◽  
R. S. Amano

The lifetime of the modern gas turbines greatly depends on the durability of hot section components operating at high temperatures. Film cooling is key to air cooling technologies in modern gas turbine and widely used in high-temperature and high-pressure blades as an active cooling scheme. The requirements of accurate prediction of aerodynamic flow and heat transfer in gas turbine blades lay the essential foundation of cooling effectiveness improvement and working life estimation. In recent days, Large Eddy Simulations (LES) is considered as a useful tool to predict turbulent flows and heat transfer around gas turbine blades, but, comparing to the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) methods, the LES method usually needs more computing resource and depends on computational power and mesh quality. In this paper, LES/DES (Detached Eddy Simulation) predictions were compared to RANS prediction with interest in the accuracy and improvement of turbulent flow and heat transfer phenomena around NASA’s C3X high-pressure gas turbine vane with leading edge cooling film. RANS/LES/DES were detailed and further investigated to assess their ability to predict flow and heat transfer in boundary layer around C3X vane. The current predictions showed that the mix between film cooling injections and free stream resulted in complex flow and heat transfer in the boundary layer on the external vane surface. The predictions of the aerodynamic load along the C3X vane with RANS/LES/DES were almost identical and agreed well with the experimental results. However, the heat transfer predictions with RANS/LES/DES were different. The transition prediction showed the best agreement with the experiment data in the most region. The LES prediction only partially agreed with the experimental data before separation point on the suction side and mild pressure gradient region on the pressure side. The DES and RANS predictions agreed with the experiment data after separation point on the suction side and most region on the pressure side.



Author(s):  
Jae Su Kwak ◽  
Jaeyong Ahn ◽  
Je-Chin Han ◽  
C. Pang Lee ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
...  

Detailed heat transfer coefficient distributions on a gas turbine squealer tip blade were measured using a hue detection based transient liquid crystals technique. The heat transfer coefficients on the shroud and near tip regions of the pressure and suction sides of a blade were also measured. Squealer rims were located along (a) the camber line, (b) the pressure side, (c) the suction side, (d) the pressure and suction sides, (e) the camber line and the pressure side, and (f) the camber line and the suction side, respectively. Tests were performed on a five-bladed linear cascade with a blow down facility. The Reynolds number based on the cascade exit velocity and the axial chord length of a blade was 1.1×106 and the overall pressure ratio was 1.2. Heat transfer measurements were taken at the three tip gap clearances of 1.0%, 1.5% and 2.5% of blade span. Results show that the heat transfer coefficients on the blade tip and the shroud were significantly reduced by using a squealer tip blade. Results also showed that a different squealer geometry arrangement changed the leakage flow path and resulted in different heat transfer coefficient distributions. The suction side squealer tip provided the lowest heat transfer coefficient on the blade tip and near tip regions compared to the other squealer geometry arrangements.



Author(s):  
T. S. Dhanasekaran ◽  
Ting Wang

Film cooling technique has been successfully applied to gas turbine blades to prevent it from the hot flue gas. However, a continuous demand of increasing the turbine inlet temperature to raise the efficiency of the turbine requires continuous improvement in film cooling effectiveness. The concept of injecting mist (tiny water droplets) into the cooling fluid has been proven under laboratory conditions to significantly augment adiabatic cooling effectiveness 50–800% in convective heat transfer and impingement cooling. The similar concept of ejecting mist into air film cooling has not been proven in the laboratory, but computational simulation has been performed on stationary turbine blades. As a continuation of previous research, this paper extends the mist film cooling scheme to the rotating turbine blade. For the convenience of understanding the effect of rotation, the simulation is first conducted with a single pair of cooling hole located near the leading edge at either side of the blade. Then a row of multiple-hole film cooling jets are simulated at stationary and rotational condition. Operating condition under both the laboratory (baseline) and elevated gas turbine conditions are simulated and compared. The effects of various parameters including mist concentration, water droplet diameter, droplet wall boundary condition, blowing ratio, and rotational speed are investigated. The results showed the effect of rotation on droplets at lab condition is minimal. The CFD model employed the Discrete Phase Model (DPM) including both wall film and droplet reflect conditions. The results showed that the droplet-wall interaction is stronger on the pressure side than on the suction side resulting in a higher mist cooling enhancement on the pressure side. The average mist cooling enhancement of about 15% and 35% are achieved on the laboratory and elevated conditions, respectively. This translates into a significant blade surface temperature reduction of 100–125 K with 10% mist injection at elevated condition.



Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document