Introducing Film Cooling Uniformity Coefficient (CUC)
A well performance film cooling implies for a high cooling effectives accompanied with a wide cooling coverage. During the past six decades, film cooling effectiveness has been well defined with a specific relation to quantify it. However, despite of numerous film cooling research, there is not an explicit method to quantify the uniformity of a coolant film spread over the hot surfaces. This work introduces a cooling uniformity coefficient (CUC) to evaluate how well a coolant film spreads over a surface being cooled. Four different cases are computationally studied. In the three cases, a single jet is injected into a hot cross flow with different jet exit shapes (i.e. square, spanwise rectangular, and streamwise rectangular). The fourth case is a novel combined triple jet (CTJ) introduced in our previous work. The cross sections of all the systems are equal to maintain the same coolant mass flow rate injection into the hot cross flow. The CUC’s of the different cases are compared with each other at two blowing ratios of 0.5 and 1.5. It is proposed that in addition to the film cooling effectiveness, the CUC is a necessary parameter to evaluate how well a coolant film is spread over a hot surface.