Impingement/Effusion Cooling Wall Heat Transfer: Reduced Number of Impingement Jet Holes Relative to the Effusion Holes

Internal wall heat transfer for impingement/effusion cooling was measured and predicted using conjugate heat transfer (CHT) computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The work was only concerned with the internal wall heat transfer and not with the effusion film cooling and there was no hot gas crossflow. Previous work had predicted impingement/effusion internal wall cooling with equal number of holes. The present work investigated a small number of impingement holes and a larger number of effusion holes. The aim was to see if the effusion holes acted as a suction surface to the impingement surface flow and thus enhanced the wall heat transfer. Hole ratios of 1/4, 1/9 and 1/25 were studied by varying the number of effusion holes for a fixed array of impingement holes and a fixed impingement gap, Z, of 8 mm. The Z/D for the impingement holes was 2.7. The impingement hole pitch, X, to diameter, D ratio X/D was 10.6 at a constant effusion hole X/D of 4.7 for all the configurations. The impingement holes were aligned on the midpoint of four effusion holes. The results were computed for a mass flux G from 0.1–0.94 kg/sm2bar for all n. This gave 26 separate CFD/CHT computations. Locally surface, X2, average heat transfer coefficient (HTC), hx, values were determined using the lumped capacitance method. Nimonic 75 metal walls with imbedded thermocouples were used to determine hx from the time constant in a transient cooling experiment following electrical heating to about 80°C. The CHT/CFD predictions showed good agreement with measured data and the highest number of effusion holes for the 1/25 hole ratio gave the highest h. However, comparison with the predicted and experimental results for equal number of impingement and effusion holes for the same Z, showed that there was little advantage of decreasing the number of impingement holes, apart from that of decreasing the Z/D significantly for the 1/15 hole ratio, which increased the heat transfer. The largest number of effusion holes had the highest heat transfer due to the greater internal surface area of the holes and their closer spacing. This was present irrespective of the number of impingement holes and there was no evidence of any benefit of the 25 effusion holes enhancing the single impingement jet heat transfer. For the lowest number of effusion hole there was predicted to be a small disadvantage of reducing the number of impingement jets.