Heat transfer in a rotating two-inlet wedge-shaped channel with pin-fins

Abstract

Heat transfer in rotating channels attracts a significant amount of research attentions due to its application in turbomachinery. The current work focuses on the heat transfer in a pin-fin-arrayed wedge-shaped channel with multiple inlets and outlets, which is a typical model of the internal cooling passage in a turbine blade trailing tail. Unlike the traditional single-inlet channel, the two-inlet configuration generates a counteractive flow which could improve the heat transfer uniformity in the channel. The overall Reynolds number and rotation number that are evaluated with the total mass-flowrate vary from 20,000 to 45,000 and 0 to 0.155, respectively. In rotating conditions, a critical mass-flowrate ratio can be identified, where the rotational effect can be neglected, suggesting that the rotational effects on heat transfer could be suppressed by introducing the second stream of coolant. Finally, the data in the current work are compared with the previous measurements conducted in the channels with different channel orientation, turbulator and channel cross-section. It is found that the rotational effect is sensitive to channel orientation regardless of cross-section and turbulators.