Numerical Study of Film Cooling Enhancement in Gas Turbine Combustor Liner

Author(s):  
Ganesh Subbuswamy ◽  
Xianchang Li

Combustion chamber or combustor is one of the hottest parts of a gas turbine. Liner is where the actual flame occurs in a combustor and thus, the hottest part of the combustor. The temperature of working fluid inside a liner is about 1200 to 2000K. Because of the hot fluid, the liner is heated up to a temperature almost impossible for the material to withstand. Although the mechanical stresses experienced by the combustor liner are within acceptable limits, high temperatures and large temperature gradients affect the structural integrity of its components, which makes the liner a very critical component of a gas turbine in structural and thermal designs. Film cooling is a traditional method of cooling the inner surface of liner. In film cooling for a combustor, axial holes are drilled along the surface of the liner at discrete locations, through which cold air is injected axially into the liner to provide a film of cool air that prevents direct contact of hot air, and thus, protects the inner wall surface. The film is destroyed in the downstream to the flow because of mixing of cool and hot air. Though this method provides an acceptable cooling, there is a compromise with the increased net benefits of the gas turbine. Therefore, there is a need for new cooling techniques or enhancing the techniques available. The current work is a numerical simulation of film cooling in a model combustor. The effect of coolant injection angles and blowing ratios on film cooling effectiveness is studied. One innovative method, cooling with mist injection, is explored to enhance the performance of film cooling. The effect of droplet size and mist concentration, which can affect the performance of the mist injection, is also analyzed. Fluent, a commercial CFD software, is used in the current work for numerical simulations.

Author(s):  
Srinivasa Rao Para ◽  
Xianchang Li ◽  
Ganesh Subbuswamy

To improve the gas turbine thermal performance, apart from using a high compression ratio, the turbine inlet temperature must be increased. Therefore, the gas temperature inside the combustion chamber needs to be maintained at a very high level. Hence, cooling of the combustor liner becomes critical. Among all the cooling techniques, film cooling has been successfully applied to cool the combustor liner. In film cooling, coolant air is introduced through discrete holes and forms a thin film between the hot gases and the inner surface of the liner, so that the inner wall can be protected from overheating. The film will be destroyed in the downstream flow because of mixing of hot and cold gases. The present work focuses on numerical study of film cooling under operating conditions, i.e., high temperature and pressure. The effect of coolant injection angles and blowing ratios on film cooling effectiveness is studied. A promising technology, cooling with mist injection, is studied under operating conditions. The effect of droplet size and mist concentration is also analyzed. The results of this study indicate that the film cooling effectiveness can increase ∼11% at gas turbine operating conditions with mist injection of 2% coolant air when droplets of 10μm and a blowing ratio of 1.0 are applied. The cooling performance can be further improved by higher mist concentration. The commercial CFD software, Fluent 6.3.26, is used in this study and the standard k-ε model with enhanced wall functions is adopted as the turbulence model.


Author(s):  
G. J. Sturgess

The paper deals with a small but important part of the overall gas turbine engine combustion system and continues earlier published work on turbulence effects in film cooling to cover the case of film turbulence. Film cooling of the gas turbine combustor liner imposes certain geometric limitations on the coolant injection device. The impact of practical film injection geometry on the cooling is one of increased rates of film decay when compared to the performance from idealized injection geometries at similar injection conditions. It is important to combustor durability and life estimation to be able to predict accurately the performance obtainable from a given practical slot. The coolant film is modeled as three distinct regions, and the effects of injection slot geometry on the development of each region are described in terms of film turbulence intensity and initial circumferential non-uniformity of the injected coolant. The concept of the well-designed slot is introduced and film effectiveness is shown to be dependent on it. Only slots which can be described as well-designed are of interest in practical equipment design. A prediction procedure is provided for well-designed slots which describes growth of the film downstream of the first of the three film regions. Comparisons of predictions with measured data are made for several very different well-designed slots over a relatively wide range of injection conditions, and good agreement is shown.


1980 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 524-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Sturgess

The paper deals with a small but important part of the overall gas turbine engine combustion system and continues earlier published work on turbulence effects in film cooling to cover the case of film turbulence. Film cooling of the gas turbine combustor liner imposes certain geometric limitations on the coolant injection device. The impact of practical film injection geometry on the cooling is one of increased rates of film decay when compared to the performance from idealized injection geometries at similar injection conditions. It is important to combustor durability and life estimation to be able to predict accurately the performance obtainable from a given practical slot. The coolant film is modeled as three distinct regions, and the effects of injection slot geometry on the development of each region are described in terms of film turbulence intensity and initial circumferential non-uniformity of the injected coolant. The concept of the well-designed slot is introduced and film effectiveness is shown to be dependent on it. Only slots which can be described as well-designed are of interest in practical equipment design. A prediction procedure is provided for well-designed slots which describes growth of the film downstream of the first of the three film regions. Comparisons of predictions with measured data are made for several very different well-designed slots over a relatively wide range of injection conditions, and good agreement is shown.


1977 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Paradis

Experiments have been performed on the film cooling of gas turbine blades in order to study the influence of large temperature differences on the effectiveness of film cooling. A two-dimensional flat plate model was tested in a stream of 1000 K combustion gases flowing at between 110 and 170 m/s. The model was cooled on both sides by jets of air coming from flush angled slots. The range of velocity ratios Uc/Ug covered was from 0.3 to 1.7 and the range of blowing rates was between 0.5 and 5. Film cooling effectiveness was measured and boundary layer traverses were performed. It has been found that once radiation and conduction effects are taken into account, the simple equations proposed by previous workers for the constant property case could be used with little error.


2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Lerch ◽  
Rainer Bauer ◽  
Joerg Krueckels ◽  
Marc Henze

Abstract Optimizing the aerothermal performance of the combustor–turbine interface is an important factor in enhancing the efficiency of heavy-duty gas turbines. Also, it is a key requirement to fulfill the lifetime in this hottest area of the gas turbine. Typically transition pieces of can combustors induce a highly nonuniform swirling flow at the turbine inlet. In order to better understand the impact of the nonuniform combustor flow at the first stage vanes, a combined experimental and numerical study was carried out. The experimental facility consisted of a high-speed linear cascade with four vane passages, including an upstream transition piece, which was representative of a heavy-duty gas turbine can combustor–turbine interface geometry. The experiments were conducted at engine representative Mach numbers, and film cooling effectiveness measurements were performed at three different blowing ratios. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulations were undertaken using a commercial flow solver. The numerical model was first validated with the experimental data, using inlet traverse five-hole probe measurements, pressure taps along the airfoil perimeter, and oil flow visualization results. The investigation shows that the position of the vane relative to the combustor transition piece has a significant impact on the vane aerodynamics and also film cooling behavior. This understanding was important for a robust first vane aerothermal design of the GT36.


Author(s):  
A. Lerch ◽  
R. Bauer ◽  
J. Krueckels ◽  
M. Henze

Abstract Optimizing the aero-thermal performance of the combustor-turbine interface is an important factor in enhancing the efficiency of heavy-duty gas turbines. Also, it is a key requirement to fulfill the lifetime in this hottest area of the gas turbine. Typically transition pieces of can combustors induce a highly non-uniform swirling flow at the turbine inlet. In order to better understand the impact of the non-uniform combustor flow at the first stage vanes, a combined experimental and numerical study was carried out. The experimental facility consisted of a high speed linear cascade with four vane passages, including an upstream transition piece, which was representative of a heavy duty gas turbine can combustor-turbine interface geometry. The experiments were conducted at engine representative Mach numbers and film cooling effectiveness measurements were performed at three different blowing ratios. CFD RANS simulations were undertaken using a commercial flow solver. The numerical model was first validated with the experimental data, using inlet traverse 5-hole probe measurements, pressure taps along the airfoil perimeter and oil flow visualization results. The investigation shows that the position of the vane relative to the combustor transition piece has a significant impact on the vane aerodynamics and also film cooling behavior. This understanding was key to a robust first vane aerothermal design of the GT36.


Author(s):  
Cuong Q. Nguyen ◽  
Nghia V. T. Tran ◽  
Bryan C. Bernier ◽  
Son H. Ho ◽  
Jayanta S. Kapat

Film cooling performance is affected by many factors, for example: geometrical factors (injection angle, length-to-hole diameter ratio, surface roughness, etc.) as well as flow conditions (mass flux ratio, momentum flux ratio, turbulence intensity, etc.). In most of the film cooling literature, film effectiveness has been used as criterion to judge and/or compare between film cooling designs. Uniformity is also a critical factor, since it is determining how well the coolant spreading out downstream to protect the working surface in a gas turbine engine. Better cooling uniformity will reduce thermal stress associated with gas turbine components. A flat plate with round holes embedded in a trench is considered in this study. Although the trench may have an adverse effect on fan-shaped film hole cooling, it tremendously increases the performance of the round-hole film cooling technique in terms of film cooling effectiveness. An experimental study at CATER facility has shown that the cooling effectiveness can be retained by the addition of a trench feature while using only half a number of cooling holes. The current work is conducted based on the numerical study with a validation from in-house experimental works at CATER and the experiments from the literature. The experimental temperature distribution is captured by using Temperature Sensitive Paint and then span-wised effectiveness is calculated. The studied input parameters include flow variables (blowing ratio, BR and momentum ratio, MR) and geometrical parameters (trench-depth-to-diameter ratio, s/D and pitch-to-diameter ratio, p/D). A comparison of contributions of studied factors is investigated by using Response Surface Methodology technique. The spatially adiabatic film cooling effectiveness is selected as the primary output in the design of experimental analysis. Since the nonlinear behavior of all input factors are also of interest, three levels of each parameter will be considered. The well-know Box and Behnken design is employed to carry on this sensitivity analysis. With this method, the current study only requires 25 runs to obtain a quantified comparison of the contribution of each involved effects.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Ahmed A. Imram ◽  
Humam K. Jalghef ◽  
Falah F. Hatem

     The effect of introducing ramp with a cylindrical slot hole on the film cooling effectiveness has been investigated experimentally and numerically. The film cooling effectiveness measurements are obtained experimentally. A test study was performed at a single mainstream with Reynolds number 76600 at three different coolant to mainstream blowing ratios 1.5, 2, and 3. Numerical simulation is introduced to primarily estimate the best ramp configurations and to predict the behavior of the transport phenomena in the region linked closely to the interaction between the coolant air injection and the hot air mainstram flow. The results showed that using ramps with trench cylindrical holes would enhanced the overall film cooling effectiveness by 83.33% compared with baseline model at blowing ratio of 1.5, also  the best overall flim cooling effectevness was obtained at blowing ratio of 2 while it is reduced at blowing ratio of 3.


2003 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jae Su Kwak ◽  
Je-Chin Han

Experimental investigations were performed to measure the detailed heat transfer coefficients and film cooling effectiveness on the squealer tip of a gas turbine blade in a five-bladed linear cascade. The blade was a two-dimensional model of a first stage gas turbine rotor blade with a profile of the GE-E3 aircraft gas turbine engine rotor blade. The test blade had a squealer (recessed) tip with a 4.22% recess. The blade model was equipped with a single row of film cooling holes on the pressure side near the tip region and the tip surface along the camber line. Hue detection based transient liquid crystals technique was used to measure heat transfer coefficients and film cooling effectiveness. All measurements were done for the three tip gap clearances of 1.0%, 1.5%, and 2.5% of blade span at the two blowing ratios of 1.0 and 2.0. The Reynolds number based on cascade exit velocity and axial chord length was 1.1×106 and the total turning angle of the blade was 97.9 deg. The overall pressure ratio was 1.2 and the inlet and exit Mach numbers were 0.25 and 0.59, respectively. The turbulence intensity level at the cascade inlet was 9.7%. Results showed that the overall heat transfer coefficients increased with increasing tip gap clearance, but decreased with increasing blowing ratio. However, the overall film cooling effectiveness increased with increasing blowing ratio. Results also showed that the overall film cooling effectiveness increased but heat transfer coefficients decreased for the squealer tip when compared to the plane tip at the same tip gap clearance and blowing ratio conditions.


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