Multi-Pass Serpentine Cooling Designs for Negating Coriolis Force Effect on Heat Transfer: 45-Degree Angled Rib Turbulated Channels

Abstract

Traditional gas turbine blades are equipped with serpentine passages arranged along the height, wherein the coolant flows radially outward in 1st passage and radially inward in 2nd passage. Prior experimental studies have established that for traditional two-pass rib roughened ducts, under the influence of Coriolis and centrifugal forces, the heat transfer gets enhanced on trailing side for radially outward flow and gets reduced on the leading side for a radially outward flow. A reverse trend in heat transfer is observed for radially inward flow. Rotation induced forces result in non-uniform heat transfer coefficient distribution which results in non-uniform metal temperatures under steady state condition. Present study addresses the problem of non-uniform heat transfer distribution on leading and trailing sides due to rotation effect. Experimental investigation of two configurations has been carried out, where Coriolis effect was negated by aligning the coolant flow vector and rotation vector such that their cross product was effectively a null vector. Novel multi-passage serpentine ducts featuring 45-degree angled rib turbulators with four-passage and six-passage configurations have been studied. Transient liquid crystal thermography experiments were carried out under stationary and rotating conditions. Heat transfer experiments were carried out for Reynolds numbers ranging from 12000 to 80000 under stationary conditions and rotating heat transfer experiments were carried out at two Rotation numbers of 0.05 and 0.11. We found that the heat transfer characteristics of serpentine passages were not influenced by Coriolis force after the 2nd passage. The local heat transfer distribution on leading and trailing sides of serpentine passages were near-similar to each other and comparable with corresponding stationary cases. The contribution of multiple passages connected with 180-degree bends towards overall frictional losses has been evaluated in terms of pumping power and normalized friction factor. The configurations are ranked based on their thermal hydraulic performances over a wide range of Reynolds numbers. The heat transfer enhancement levels of four-passage rib roughened duct was higher than the six-passage configuration and the six-passage configuration had slightly higher thermal hydraulic performance compared to four-passage configuration.