Enhanced thermal performance of a pin-fin cooling channel for gas turbine blade by density-based topology optimization

Abstract

Pin-fin arrays are commonly used in the trailing edge region of gas turbine blades to enhance heat transfer and strengthen the blade's integrity, but the traditional pin elements may cause low thermal performance in the channel. Previous studies have proposed different strategies to reduce the flow friction and control convective heat transfer by empirical designs, leading to extremely cost- and time-consuming. Density-based topology optimization considering a turbulent flow is leveraged in this work to improve the thermal performance of the cooling channel, and the pressure loss minimization is selected as the objective. The results show that complex flow generated by different elements in the optimized design provides a better temperature uniformity. Compared with the same solid volume case, the optimized model causes a lower pressure loss, by about 156.7%, at comparable endwall heat transfer. In this study, the optimized model shows the highest thermal performance among the comparative models due to promoting applicably higher heat transfer at a low-pressure loss. The optimized results also show that the density-based method leveraged in this work can be used to optimize different channel configurations, which maximize the improvement of the cooling channel.