Comparisons of blade tip phantom cooling effectiveness for two tip structures with three tip clearances

Abstract

The blade tip region of the gas turbine is exposed to an extreme operating condition with a high heat load. The conventional cooling concept that places cooling holes on the tip would consume a lot of cooling air and lead to a reduction in thermal efficiency. Whereas phantom cooling was supposed to help cool the tip region without using additional cooling air. In this paper, computational comparisons were conducted to forecast the tip phantom cooling effects caused by the blade ejections by employing the standard k-ω model. Then, phantom cooling performance was presented under the flat tip (FT) and the squealer tip (ST), with three tip clearances. Results show that the FT shows a better phantom cooling performance compared to the ST. The phantom cooling effects on the FT are distributed at the tip forepart and near the pressure side (PS). Whereas, for the ST, traces of phantom cooling are barely detected on the PS rim. Increasing the tip clearance would weaken the phantom cooling performance on the FT forepart but enhance it on the rear part. For the ST, its phantom cooling effectiveness values decrease as the tip clearance increases. A lower aerodynamic loss is obtained for the ST under any coolant MFR or tip clearance.