Internal cooling near trailing edge of a gas turbine airfoil with cooling airflow through blockages with holes

Naphthalene sublimation experiments were conducted to study heat transfer for flow through blockages with holes in an internal cooling passage near the trailing edge of a gas turbine airfoil. The cooling passage was modeled as two rectangular channels whose heights decreased along the main flow direction. The air made a right-angled turn before passing through two blockages with staggered holes in each channel, and left the channel through an exit that was partially blocked by periodic lands with rounded leading edges. There were ten holes along each blockage and all of the holes had rounded edges. Local heat (mass) transfer was measured, and overall heat (mass) transfer results were obtained, on the exposed surfaces of one of the walls downstream of the two blockages, for Reynolds numbers (based on the hydraulic diameter of the channel at the upstream surface of the first blockage) between 5,000 and 36,000. The results showed that the blockages with the larger hole-to-channel cross-sectional area ratio in one of the two test sections enhanced the heat (mass) transfer downstream of the blockages more than the blockages with the smaller open area ratio in the second test section. For the geometric configurations and flow conditions studied, the average heat (mass) transfer was higher downstream of the second blockage than downstream of the first blockage. The configurations of the inlet channel and the exit slots considered in this study did not significantly affect the local heat (mass) transfer distributions or the average heat (mass) transfer downstream of the blockages.