Numerical Study on Cooling Performance of a Steam-Cooled Blade Based on Response Surface Method

Abstract

In order to investigate the cooling mechanism of the turbine blade and to enrich and supplement the experimental study of the blade, a numerical study of a steam-cooled blade with five cooling channels was carried out based on the response surface model. The surface cooling efficiency and dimensionless temperature distribution of the steam-cooled blade were obtained with different mainstream inlet temperature, outlet pressure, pressure ratio of inlet to outlet, temperature ratio and flow ratio of steam to mainstream by using the flow-solid coupling numerical method. The influence of the working parameters on the cooling performance of air-cooled blade and steam-cooled blade, including the average cooling efficiency, temperature non-uniformity, and average dimensionless temperature, was comparatively investigated; the correlation equation of the working parameters on the cooling performance of the steam-cooled blade was obtained. The results show that the influence of mainstream inlet temperature and outlet pressure on the cooling performance of the steam-cooled blade is not significant; the cooling efficiency of the steam-cooled blade increases by 5.92%, 7.35% and 26.51% respectively as the mainstream inlet to outlet pressure ratio, the temperature ratio and the flow ratio of steam to mainstream increase; the dimensionless temperature increases by 3.74% as the temperature ratio increases and decreases by 0.93% and 4.09% as mainstream inlet to outlet pressure ratio and flow ratio increase; the temperature non-uniformity decreases by 4.09% and 30.08% respectively, as the mainstream inlet to outlet pressure ratio and temperature ratio increase and increases by 37.99% as the flow ratio increases; the effect of working parameters on air-cooled blade and steam-cooled blade is the same, but the steam-cooled blade has 14.06–17.81% higher cooling efficiency, 18.47–29.01% higher temperature non-uniformity and 1.86–2.58% lower dimensionless temperature compared to the air-cooled blade under the same working parameters; the correlation equation obtained by fitting the response surface model has higher accuracy.