Mist film cooling simulation at gas turbine operating conditions

Abstract

Air film cooling has been successfully used to cool gas turbine hot sections for the last half century. A promising technology is proposed to enhance air film cooling with water mist injection. Numerical simulations have shown that injecting a small amount of water droplets into the cooling air improves film-cooling performance significantly. However, previous studies were conducted at conditions of low Reynolds number, temperature, and pressure to allow comparisons with experimental data. As a continuous effort to develop a realistic mist film cooling scheme, this paper focuses on simulating mist film cooling under typical gas turbine operating conditions of high temperature and pressure. The mainstream flow is at 15 atm with a temperature of 1561 K. Both 2D and 3D cases are considered with different hole geometries on a flat surface, including a 2D slot, a simple round hole, a compound-angle hole, and fan-shaped holes. The results show that 10–20% mist (based on the coolant mass flow rate) achieves 5–10% cooling enhancement and provides an additional 30–68 K adiabatic wall temperature reduction. Uniform droplets of 5–20 μm are used. The droplet trajectories indicate the droplets tend to move away from the wall, which results in a lower cooling enhancement than under low pressure and temperature conditions. The commercial software Fluent is adopted in this study, and the standard k– ε model with enhanced wall treatment is adopted as the turbulence model.