Heat Transfer and Flow Studies of Different Cooling Configurations for Gas Turbine Rotor Blade

Military gas turbine engine operates at turbine entry temperatures (TET) of the order of 2000K. Increase in TET improves thermal efficiency and power output. The gas temperature is far above the allowable metal temperature of turbine components. Hence, there is a need to cool the components such as blades and vanes for safe operation. The blades are cooled by combination of internal convective cooling and external film-cooling. Rib tabulators are widely used in blade cooling passages to enhance heat transfer. In the present study, different rib tabulator configurations have been studied. 1D flow network model of blade cooling passages have been modeled using Flowmaster software. Flowmaster software estimates pressure losses, rotational effects and heat transfer of the coolant flow in the blade passages. Cooling passages are modeled as ducts while film cooling holes, impingement holes, tip holes and ejection holes are modeled as orifices. Experimentally measured heat transfer and pressure loss correlations are used in the analysis. The coolant pressure at inlet and sink pressure at exit of film cooling holes are given as input. The heat load coming on to the blade is also given as input for predicting the coolant temperature rise and blade metal temperature. The thermal analysis is carried out with different shaped rib turbulators such as V and W ribs with broken and continuous pattern. It is observed that thermal performance factor for a broken V rib configuration is better than other configurations. The metal temperature for broken V ribbed configuration is 25°C less compared other configurations. The effect of rotation on the blade temperature is also studied. The convective bulk temperatures and convective heat transfer coefficients obtained from 1D flow network are applied on 2D Finite Element (FE) model to obtain nodal temperature distribution.