NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF FILM AND IMPINGEMENT COOLING SCHEMES FOR GAS TURBINE APPLICATION

In modern gas turbine engines, many sophisticated cooling schemes are used to maintain the turbine blade temperature in acceptable levels. These schemes, such as convective cooling, film cooling, impingement cooling and the use of pin fins, can be combined to increase the cooling effectiveness. Jet impingement cooling, pin fins and convective cooling are internal cooling techniques, in which the cooling is achieved based on coolant flow through internal blade channels decreasing the blade metal temperature. Film cooling is an external cooling technique, in which the cold fluid (air) is injected into the hot gas flow through discrete holes providing a coolant film at blade surface, protecting the blade metal. In this way, the present work refers to the numerical investigation of internal and external cooling strategies applied in gas turbines. The methodology developed to analyze such strategies is based on the flat-plate approach with laboratory length scales and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques, being the flow, in the study domain, considered viscous, turbulent and compressible. A commercial CFD program is used to solve the general equations of fluid mechanics with Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) technique for steady state regime and Shear Stress Transport (SST) turbulence model to determine the flow eddy viscosity. The combined effects of internal and external cooling is studied through a highly sophisticated scheme, called louver, which combines the effects of impingement and film cooling. Pin fins and ribs turbulator geometries applied in the channel between the impingement and the film cooling have the purpose of evaluating the impact of these geometries on the film cooling effectiveness over the flat surface in comparison to the louver scheme without turbulator. This study concluded that, pin fins proved to be the most promise solution because they increased in 7% the film cooling effectiveness. Ribs also have a good potential to increase the effectiveness, because an increase of 4% in film cooling effectiveness was observed. In addition, the effects of the turbulator are dependent on their location, since the turbulator positioned near the film cooling hole exit showed improvements in the film cooling effectiveness in relation to the turbulator near of the impingement cooling jet.