Numerical Investigation on Mist/Air Cooling in Rectangular Ribbed Channels With Various Aspect Ratios

Abstract

Continuously increasing gas turbine inlet temperature to further improve thermal efficiency and power output of gas turbines leads to acquiring a higher cooling effectiveness of gas turbine blades and vanes to protect them from high temperature corrosion and creeping damage. One of the new and promising technologies to greatly increase heat transfer is mist cooling by injecting a small amount of tiny droplets into coolant flow. This paper aims to numerically study the flow and heat transfer behaviors of mist/air coolant in rectangular ribbed channels with various aspect ratios of 1/4, 1/2, 1/1, 2/1 and rib angle of 60°. In addition, the distribution of secondary flows in the four ribbed channels and its effect on heat transfer are analyzed in detail. The effects of Reynolds number ranging from 10,000 to 60,000, mist mass ratios ranging from 1% to 4%, and droplet sizes ranging from 5 μm to 20 μm on heat transfer characteristics of mist/air cooling are investigated. As a comparison, the air-only coolant is also considered in the present study. The Eulerian-Lagrangian particle tracking method is adopted in this study to simulate the two-phase flow mist/air cooling. Turbulence model validation has been conducted for air-only, indicating that the numerical results with SST k-ω model are fairly consistent with experimental data. The results show that the aspect ratio has insignificant influence on longitudinal secondary flow distribution in the four ribbed channels, but greatly affects the size of main secondary flows. The channel with a smaller aspect ratio obtains a larger size of main secondary flow, which may result in decreasing the heat transfer coefficient. The average Nu on ribbed surfaces presents an increasing trend with Reynolds number and mist mass ratio for mist/air cooling. The heat transfer enhancement of mist/air as compared to air-only increases from 12.3% to 91.86% when Reynolds number ranges from 10,000 to 60,000 with injecting 2% mist into air coolant, while that increases from 7.96% to 113.15% when mist mass ratio increases from 1% to 4%. The average Nu initially increases with droplet size and then decreases. A peak value of average Nu is obtained in the case of 15μm mist among all the sizes of droplets. The case of AR = 2/1 obtains the highest average Nu, followed by the cases of AR = 1/2, 1/1 and 1/4 for both air-only and mist/air. The channel with aspect ratio of 1/2 obtains the best thermal performance in mist/air cooling channel.