Session: 12-03 Endwall Film Cooling

Paper Number: 82203

82203 - Turbine Vane Passage Cooling Experiments With a Close-Coupled Combustor-Turbine Interface Geometry Part 2: Describing the Coolant Coverage 

The first stage gas turbine vane surfaces and endwalls require aggressive cooling. This two-part paper introduces a modified design of the combustor-turbine (C-T) interface, the ‘close-coupled interface,’ that is expected to increase the cooling performance of vane passage surfaces. While the first part of the paper describes secondary flows and coolant transport in the passage, this part discusses the effects of a new C-T interface geometry on adiabatic cooling effectiveness of the endwall and vane pressure and suction surfaces. Compared to the traditional C-T interface, the coolant requirement was reduced for the same level of cooling effectiveness on all three surfaces for the new C-T interface design, confirming that it is an improvement over the previous design. The endwall crossflow was reduced by combustor coolant injection with the new interface leading to more pitchwise-uniform cooling of the endwall. For the pressure surface, increasing combustor coolant flowrate directly increases phantom cooling effectiveness and spreading of coolant away from the endwall. With the traditional passage vortex replaced by the impingement vortex, the suction surface does not receive the same level of phantom cooling as the pressure surface. However, cooling performance is still better than that observed for the previous C-T interface design.

Presenting Author: Terrence Simon University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Presenting Author Biography: Terrence W. Simon is the Ernst G. Eckert Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His major research interests include experiments, computation and visualization of heat, mass and momentum transfer in laminar, turbulent, transitional and unsteady flows, including flows through porous media and processes with phase change. Applications range from flow and heat transfer in plasma cutting tools and plasma flow actuators, electronics and optics, Stirling and gas turbine engines and MW-level grid energy storage systems. He is an active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (including a past five-year term as the Senior Technical Editor of the Journal of Heat Transfer), the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer (in which he is now the President and has served on the Executive Committee), and the American Society of Thermal and Fluids Engineers (for which he co-chaired the International Workshop on Heat Transfer in 2017).

Authors:

Kedar Nawathe University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Aaditya Nath University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Yong Kim Solar Turbines Inc.
Terrence Simon University of Minnesota, Twin Cities