Numerical study of unsteady flow and cooling characteristics of turbine blade cutback trailing edges integrated with pin fins and film holes

Abstract

Accurate prediction of the unsteady flow mixing process and its effects on cooling performance in the turbine blade trailing edge (TE) is essential to improving TE cooling designs. This paper used high accuracy transient Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) method to investigate the unsteady flow and cooling characteristics of two novel turbine blades cutback TEs under blowing ratios BRs=0.65 and 1.25. The two novel TEs have five rows of pin fins in the cooling slot and two rows of either cylindrical or fan-shaped film holes on the pressure side upstream of the cutback region. The results were compared against those of the baseline TE with only pin fins and the data obtained from Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω model.The results revealed that: 1) the coolant issued from upstream cylindrical or fan-shaped holes has significantly disturbed the Brown-Roshko vortices shedding off the lip of the top wall, but only largely reduced the magnitude of normal velocity fluctuation in the cutback region. The alternating vortices in the cutback region are stretched flat. The changes brought to the flow structures are more significant by the fan-shaped holes than the cylindrical holes; 2) Although increasing blowing ratio enhances flow unsteadiness in the cutback region of the three TEs, the differences in the magnitude of velocity fluctuations are much reduced among the three TEs; 3) The TE cutback with fan-shaped holes achieves a higher adiabatic wall cooling effectiveness ηaw on the cutback wall at BR=0.65, and also a lower reduction in ηaw at BR=1.25 than the TE cutback with cylindrical holes; 4) Transient SAS method demonstrates a better agreement of ηaw with the experimental data for the baseline TE on the cutback wall, and higher values of ηaw than the results of the SST k-ω model on the top wall.