Heat Transfer Performance of Internal Cooling Turbine Blades Using Cutted-Root Rib Design

In gas turbines, the turbine blades are always working in the highly temperature overhead the permissible metal temperatures. To safe operation, the turbine blades are needed to cool. Many research in turbine cooling technology can be categorized as internal and external cooling. This paper presents an investigation of cutted-root rib design, where a part of rib was truncated below to create an extra-passage in the root rib applied in the internal cooling turbine blades of jet engine using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes with the SST model. The object of this investigation is to reduce the vortex occurring near the rib for improving the performance of heat transfer, such as the Nusselt number and thermal performance factor. To investigate heat transfer performance and fluid flow characteristics of internal cooling turbine blades, a parametric study of the cutted-root rib were performed using various geometric parameters related to the height and shapes of the extra-passage. The cutted-root rib geometry is designed in ANSYS DesignModeler, and then meshed, analysed, and post-processed using Ansys-CFX software. The numerical results showed that all heat transfer parameter with the cutted-root rib design is greater than the original case without cutted-root rib.

Keywords: Cutted-root rib, Secondary flow, Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis, Nusselt nuber, Thermal performance factor.