Effect of Temperature Ratio on Jet Impingement Heat Transfer in Active Clearance Control Systems

Abstract

Impinging jet arrays are typically used to cool several gas turbine parts. Some examples of such applications can be found in the internal cooling of high pressure turbine airfoils or in the turbine blade tip clearances control of aero-engines. The effect of wall-to-jets temperature ratio on heat transfer is generally neglected by the correlations available in the open literature. In present contribution, the impact of the temperature ratio on the heat transfer for a real engine Active Clearance Control system, is analyzed by means of validated CFD computations. At different jets Reynolds number and considering several impingement array arrangements, a wide range of target wall-to-jets temperature ratio (TR) is accounted for. Computational results prove that both local and averaged Nusselt numbers reduce with increasing temperature ratios. An in-depth analysis of the numerical data show that the last mentioned evidence is motivated by both the heat transfer incurring between the spent coolant flow and the fresh jets and the variation of gas properties with temperature through the boundary layer. A scaling procedure, based on TR power law, was proposed to estimate the Nusselt number at different wall temperature levels necessary to correct available open-literature correlations, typically developed with small temperature differences, for real engine applications.