Film Cooling With Swirling Coolant Flow on a Flat Plate and the Endwall of High-Loaded First Nozzle

Abstract

This paper describes an experimental study on the film cooling effectiveness of circular and fan-shaped film cooling holes with a swirling film coolant injected through a flat plate and the endwall of a high-loaded first nozzle. The experiments were conducted using a flat plate wind tunnel and a two-dimensional vane cascade, which is designed based on the first-stage vane of an Energy Efficient Engine (E3) studied under a NASA project. The film cooling effectiveness on a flat plate wind tunnel and the endwall of the enlarged first nozzle of the E3 turbine was measured using pressure sensitive paint (PSP) techniques. The experimental results indicate that the film cooling effectiveness of a circular hole improved by increasing the angle θ of two impinging jets inside the cavity, which are used both for cooling the internal wall and generating a swirling motion in the film coolant. In contrast, it was found that there exist optimal jet angles of θ = 20° for a circular film cooling hole, θ = 5–10° for a flat plate wind tunnel test, and θ = 15° for the cascade test conducted using a fan-shaped film cooling hole. Thus the new film cooling method using swirling cooling air has been demonstrated to maintain high film cooling effectiveness even under such a complicated flow field.