Effect of RANS-Type Turbulence Models on Adiabatic Film Cooling Effectiveness over a Scaled Up Gas Turbine Blade Leading Edge Surface

Abstract

Increasing the gas turbine inlet temperature is one of the key technologies in raising gas turbine engine power output. Film cooling is one of the efficient cooling techniques to cool the hot section components of a gas turbine engines in turn the turbine inlet temperature can be increased. This study aims at investigating the effect of RANS-type turbulence models on adiabatic film cooling effectiveness over a scaled up gas turbine blade leading edge surfaces. For the evaluation, five different two equation RANS-type turbulent models have been taken in consideration, which are available in the ANSYS-Fluent. For this analysis, the gas turbine blade leading edge configuration is generated using Solid Works. The meshing is done using ANSYS-Workbench Mesh and ANSYS-Fluent is used as a solver to solve the flow field. The considered gas turbine blade leading edge model is having five rows of film cooling circular holes, one at stagnation line and the two each on either side of stagnation line at 30° and 60° respectively. Each row has the five holes with the hole diameter of 4 mm, pitch of 21 mm arranged in staggered manner and has the hole injection angle of 30° in span wise direction. The experiments are carried in a subsonic cascade tunnel facility at heat transfer lab of CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratory with a Reynolds number of 1,00,000 based on leading edge diameter. From the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) evaluation it is found that K–ϵ Realizable model gives more acceptable results with the experimental values, compared to the other considered turbulence models for this type of geometries. Further the CFD evaluated results, using K–ϵ Realizable model at different blowing ratios are compared with the experimental results.