Film Cooling With Wake Passing Applied To An Annular Endwall

Advancement in turbine technology has far reaching effects on today\u27s society and environment. With more than 90% of electricity and 100% of commercial air transport being produced by the usage of gas turbine, any advancement in turbine technology can have an impact on fuel used, pollutants and carbon dioxide emitted to the environment. Within the turbine engine, fully understanding film cooling is critical to reliability of a turbine engine. Film cooling is an efficient way to protect the engine surface from the extremely hot incoming gas, which is at a temperature much higher than allowable temperature of even the most advanced super alloy used in turbine. Film cooling performance is affected by many factors: geometrical factors and as well as flow conditions. In most of the film cooling literature, film effectiveness has been used as criterion to judge and/or compare between film cooling designs. Film uniformity is also a critical factor, since it determines how well the coolant spread out downstream to protect the hot-gas-path surface of a gas turbine engine. Even after consideration of all geometrical factors and flow conditions, the film effectiveness is still affected by the stator-rotor interaction, in particular by the moving wakes produced by upstream airfoils. A complete analysis of end wall film cooling inside turbine is required to fully understand the phenomena. This full analysis is almost impossible in the academic arena. Therefore, a simplified but critical experimental rig and computational fluid model were designed to capture the effect of wake on film cooling inside an annular test section. The moving wakes are created by rotating a wheel iv with 12 spokes or rods with a variable speed motor. Thus changing the motor speed will alter the wake passing frequency. This design is an advancement over most previous studies in rectangular duct, which cannot simulate wakes in an annular passage as in an engine. This rig also includes film injection that allows study of impact of moving wakes on film cooling. This wake is a simplified representation of the trailing edge created by an upstream airfoil. An annulus with 30° pitch test section is considered in this study. This experimental rig is based on an existing flat plate film cooling (BFC) rig that has been validated in the past. Measurement of velocity profiles within the moving wake downstream from the wake generator is used to validate the CFD rotating wake model. The open literature on film cooling and past experiments performed in the laboratory validated the CFD film cooling model. With these validations completed, the full CFD model predicts the wake and film cooling interaction. Nine CFD cases were considered by varying the film cooling blowing ratio and the wake Strouhal number. The results indicated that wakes highly enhance film cooling effectiveness near film cooling holes and degrades the film blanket downstream of the film injection, at the moment of wake passing. However, the time-averaged film cooling effectiveness is more or less the same with or without wak