Rotating Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics of a Novel Cooling Channel for Gas Turbine Blade Trailing Edge With Diamond-Type TPMS Structures

Abstract

Abstract This work designs a Diamond-type triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structure that exhibits excellent thermomechanical properties in a gas turbine blade trailing edge to enhance thermal performance and improve heat transfer uniformity. Since the velocity and temperature distributions are altered in the rotating trailing edge channel, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of the baseline pin fin and Diamond TPMS models are numerically investigated at the Reynolds number of 10,000 and the rotation numbers of 0.0–0.28. Compared to the baseline model, the Diamond TPMS network significantly decreases recirculation flow at the inner wall, improving heat transfer, especially at the tip and outlet regions. Although the Diamond TPMS model incurs substantial pressure losses from 191% to 234%, it yields significantly higher overall heat transfer than the pin fins by 179%. Consequently, the thermal performance increased by 93.4%. The flow fluctuations due to the rotating effects are minor in the Diamond TPMS architecture, considerably reducing the differences in heat transfer between the leading and trailing walls. The differences in the wetted-area averaged Nusselt number of the baseline and Diamond TPMS models within the studied rotation numbers are 8.5–14.4% and about 8.5%, respectively. Moreover, the Diamond TPMS structure reduces the differences in heat transfer between the root and tip regions at the outlet by up to 80% compared to the pin fins. This improvement helps protect the trailing edge from thermal failure, thereby potentially prolonging the gas turbine blade's lifetime.