3-D Internal Flow and Conjugate Calculations of a Convective Cooled Turbine Blade With Serpentine-Shaped and Ribbed Channels

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Modern cooling configurations for turbine blades include complex serpentine-shaped cooling channel geometries for internal-forced convective cooling. The channels are ribbed in order to enhance the convective beat transfer. The design of such cooling configurations is within the power of modem CFD-codes with combined heat transfer analysis in solid body regions. One approach is the conjugate fluid flow and heat transfer solver, CHT-Flow, developed at the Institute of Steam and Gas Turbines, Aachen University of Technology. It takes into account of the mutual influences of internal and external fluid flow and heat transfer. The strategy of the procedure is based on a multi-block-technique and a direct coupling module for fluid flow regions and solid body regions. The configuration under investigation in the present paper is based on a test design of a convective cooled turbine blade with serpentine-shaped cooling passages and cooling gas ejection at the blade tip and the trailing edge. The numerical investigations focus on secondary flow phenomena in the ducts and on the heat transfer analysis at the cooling channel walls. In the first part, the cooling channels are investigated with adiabatic smooth & ribbed walls. The calculations are carried out for the stationary and rotating configuration. Concerning the heat transfer analysis, the results of the ribbed configuration with a fixed thermal boundary condition at the walls in the stationary case are presented. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate the capability of the conjugate method to work without thermal boundary conditions, the cooling configuration is calculated including the external blade flow and the blade walls with internal and external heat transfer under typical operation conditions of gas turbines. The numerical code is used to determine the blade surface temperatures.