Experimental and Numerical Conjugate Flow and Heat Transfer Investigation of a Shower-Head Cooled Turbine Guide Vane

Abstract

This paper presents investigations of the development for a shower-head cooling configuration for a modern industrial turbine guide vane. One aim is to find suitable locations for cooling gas ejection with the lowest cooling gas mass flow possible. The investigations begin with a numerical experiment. After the prediction of a suitable configuration and operating parameters, the aerodynamics are investigated experimentally using a non-intrusive LDA technique. Once the aerodynamics had been validated, the numerical experiments were expanded to a thermal analysis of the vane. Our conjugate flow and heat transfer simulation enables thermal analysis of the vane body without us having to derive any heat transfer data beforehand. The calculations were performed for a temperature ratio of 0.5 between cooling gas and main stream. This temperature ratio is similar to the operating conditions found in current designs. The stagnation line moves under the influence of cooling gas ejection, which significantly influences the cooling gas distribution on the vane surface. The temperature distribution inside the vane is compared to a non-cooled test case. The simulation shows that the temperature peaks at the leading edge are reduced by between 18% and 44%.