Computations of Film Cooling From Holes With Struts

Abstract

Computations were performed to study the three-dimensional flow and heat transfer on a flat plate cooled by jets, injected from a plenum through one row of film-cooling holes in which each hole is fitted with a strut in the form of a circular cylinder. Three different configurations of the film-cooling hole were investigated: without strut, with streamwise strut, and with spanwise strut. For all configurations, the film-cooling holes are inclined at 35°, and the coolant-to-mainflow density and mass-flux ratios are 1.6 and 0.5, respectively. The focus of this study is to understand how struts in holes affect film cooling jets and their interactions with the mainflow in forming a protective layer of cooler fluid over the plate. This computational study is based on the ensemble-averaged conservation equations of mass, momentum (compressible Navier-Stokes), and energy. Effects of turbulence was modeled by a low Reynolds number k-ω closure known as the shear-stress-transport (SST) model. Solutions were generated by a cell-centered finite-volume method that uses third-order accurate flux-difference splitting of Roe with limiters, multigrid acceleration of a diagonalized ADI scheme with local time stepping, and patched/overlapped structured grids. In the computations, the flow is resolved not just in the cooling-jet/mainflow interaction region, but also inside the film-cooling holes and in the plenum. Computed results for adiabatic effectiveness for the case without struts were compared with experimental data, and reasonably good agreements were obtained.