Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop for Short Pin-Fin Arrays With Pin-Endwall Fillet

Abstract

The effects of array configuration and pin-endwall fillet on the heat transfer and pressure drop of short pin-fin arrays are investigated experimentally. The pin-fin element with endwall fillet, typical in actual turbine cooling applications, is modeled by a spool-like cylinder. The arrays studied include an in-line and a staggered array, each having seven rows of five pins. These arrays have the same geometric parameters, i.e., H/D = 1, S/D = X/D = 2.5, and the Reynolds number ranging from 5 × 103 to 3 × 104. One of the present results shows that the staggered array always has a higher array-averaged heat transfer coefficient than its in-line counterpart. However, the pressure drop for the staggered array is higher compared to the in-line configuration. These trends are unaffected by the existence of the pin-endwall fillet. Another significant finding is that an array with pin-endwall fillet generally produces lower heat transfer coefficient and higher pressure drop than that without endwall fillet. This leads to the conclusion that pin-endwall fillet is undesirable for heat transfer augmentation. In addition, nai¨ve use of the heat transfer results obtained with perfectly circular cylinders tends to overestimate the pin-fin cooling capability in the actual turbine. The effects of endwall fillet on the array heat transfer and pressure drop are much more pronounced for the staggered array than for the inline array; however, they diminish as the Reynolds number increases.