Leading Edge Film Cooling of a Turbine Blade Model Through Single and Double Row Injection: Effects of Coolant Density

Abstract

Experiments have been conducted on a large model of a turbine blade. Attention has been focussed on the leading edge region, which has a semi-circular shape and four rows of film cooling holes positioned symmetrically about the stagnation line. The cooling holes were oriented in a spanwise direction with an inclination of 30° to the surface, and had streamwise locations of ±15° and ±44° from the stagnation line. Film cooling effectiveness was measured using a heat/mass analogy. Single row cooling from the holes at 15° and 44° showed similar patterns: spanwise averaged effectiveness which rises from zero at zero coolant mass flow to a maximum value η* at some value of mass flow ratio M*, then drops to low values of η at higher M. The trends can be quantitatively explained from simple momentum considerations for either air or CO2 as the coolant gas. Close to the holes, air provides higher η values for small M. At higher M, particularly farther downstream, the CO2 may be superior. The use of an appropriately defined momentum ratio G collapses the data from both holes using either CO2 or air as coolant onto a single curve. For η*, the value of G for all data is about 0.1. Double row cooling with air as coolant shows that the relative stagger of the two rows is an important parameter. Holes in line with each other in successive rows can provide improvements in spanwise averaged film cooling effectiveness of as much as 100% over the common staggered arrangement. This improvement is due to the interaction between coolant from rows one and two, which tends to provide complete coverage of the downstream surface when the rows are placed correctly with respect to each other.