Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis of Military Aero Engine Combustor Liner With Impingement and Effusion Cooling

Abstract

Abstract Improvement in specific thrust is one of the desirable requirements for Military aero-engine which has led to a tremendous increase in turbine inlet temperatures. This has resulted in combustion chambers to operate at a gas temperature of the order of 2100K, making it difficult for the thermal designers to design a liner cooling configuration to bring down its metal temperature within allowable limits with available coolant air. The present study highlights the computational prediction of cooling effectiveness for impingement-effusion cooled combustor liner. The impingement cooling is adopted to the effusion cooled liner in order to enhance its coolant side heat transfer. 1-Dimensional (1-D) analysis is carried out to obtain a suitable impingement geometry to improve the coolant side heat transfer. Suitable geometrical features like impingement hole diameter (di) and distance of the impingement plate from effusion liner (z) are arrived for enhancement of coolant side heat transfer. Conjugate Heat Transfer analysis (CHT) is carried out for three cooling configurations with different impingement hole diameter. Effusion cooled liner with porosity 1% and holes inclined at 22° and for impingement plate hole porosity of 1.6% is maintained for all the configurations. CHT analysis is carried out for effusion cooled liner using ANSYS Fluent ver.14.5. The film cooling predictions are in good agreement for effusion cooled liner plate with measurements. SST k-ω turbulence model with enhanced wall function predicted well. The effectiveness obtained for effusion cooled liner and impingement-effusion cooled liner are compared. There is an improvement of 34% in effectiveness for impingement-effusion cooled liner compared to effusion cooled liner with a reduction of coolant air mass flow by 10%. The variation of temperature for the impingement-effusion cooled liner is lower. Parametric analysis is also carried out to study the effect of blowing ratio and metal thermal conductivity on the film cooling effectiveness for impingement-effusion cooled liner.