Pressure Losses for Jet Array Impingement With Crossflow

Jet impingement is an efficient heat transfer method and has been used successfully in cooling of turbine blades in gas turbine engines. Although many studies have been conducted on the heat transfer characteristics of jet impingement array, there is a lack of knowledge in pressure drop characteristics of large jet impingement arrays. The pressure losses encountered are becoming increasingly important when applied to micro gas turbines, cooling concentrated solar panels and high density electronic chips. The present work focuses on experimental and theoretical investigation of pressure losses in low Re impingement arrays, 200< Re <3000. Experiments were carried out on jet impingement array with nozzle diameters of 200 to 800 μm. Numerical simulations were also performed with available commercial CFD tools. Reasonable comparisons between experimental results and numerical simulations were obtained. Detailed flow structure, mass flow rate distribution, jet velocity profiles, and pressure drop within the array in the streamwise direction were obtained from the CFD simulations. These simulations enhance the understanding of the physics within multiple jet impingement system. Additionally a semi empirical–analytical method is developed for calculating the total pressure loss within a multi jet impingement system. This simple methodology can provide a quick estimate of the total pressure drop and hence is suited for first order optimization. The methodology is validated by results obtained from experiments and from CFD simulations.