Impact of blade leading edge film coolant on the blade tip phantom cooling

Abstract

Numerical simulations are carried out to predict the tip phantom cooling from blade leading edge (LE) coolant. The impact of spanwise angle of the blade LE film holes on the blade tip phantom cooling are investigated in detail under various the mass flow ratios (MFR) of coolant to mainstream from 0.3% to 1.3%. The results demonstrate that the LE film coolant could help cool the tip. These coolants mainly affect the aerothermal performance of the tip forepart and have little impact on that of the tip rear part. Increasing the coolant MFR has an obvious improvement on the tip phantom cooling level, the area-averaged cooling effectiveness could increase more than 2 times in comparing the cases with a higher MFR and a lower one. The cooling effectiveness on the LE surface first increase then decrease as a result of these coolants lift-off the LE surface with the increasing MFR. However, the LE film holes spanwise angle almost has no impact on the tip phantom cooling level at a lower MFR and even deteriorate the LE heat transfer procedure, where the cooling effectiveness decreases as the film holes spanwise angle increases.