Application of a CFD-Based Film Cooling Model to a Gas Turbine Vane Cascade With Cylindrical and Shaped Hole Endwall Film Cooling

This paper presents the application of a CFD-based film cooling model to a gas turbine vane cascade test rig. The experimental investigations feature aerodynamic and endwall film cooling measurements on a first stage gas turbine vane in a linear cascade. An extended version of a previously developed cylindrical hole film cooling model has been employed, which now includes modeling of shaped hole cooling flows. The computational domain extends approximately one axial chord length upstream of the leading edge and downstream of the trailing edge of the vane. Adjacent solid parts are included by means of a conjugate heat transfer analysis to account for conduction effects. A hybrid mesh with resolved boundary layers and high spatial mesh resolution in the near-wall region is being used. This meshing approach ensures that the near-wall mesh resolution requirements of the film cooling model are satisfied, while maintaining a manageable total node count. Results obtained using the film cooling model are compared to surface distributions of film cooling effectiveness from the experimental cascade. Due to the moderate node count (≈ 3.5 × 106), CFD calculations including film cooling flows can be performed at comparatively low computational cost. The film cooling model, which previously had been validated against flat plate measurement data and applied to single cooling hole configurations only, is therefore shown to be a viable tool for the thermal design of gas turbine components with film cooling.