The Overall Cooling Effectiveness (OCE) is a crucial parameter for the evaluation of the cooling performance of blades in modern gas turbines. However, studies on the local recovery temperature are seldom addressed in the context of the OCE. In this paper, the local recovery temperature and OCE were measured by thermocouples innovatively installed at S2, S5, and S8 profiles having blade heights of 20 %, 50 %, and 80 %, respectively. These were performed under the condition of non-uniform turbine inlet temperature. The cascade pressure ratios of 1.4–1.9 for the OEC tests were similar to those of the recovery temperature tests. The other operating conditions for the OEC tests included the KG in the range of 0.02–0.07 and the KT in the range of 2.0–3.2. Numerical simulation was conducted to analyze the coupling effect of the non-uniform cascade inlet temperature, the passage vortex, and the blade tip leakage vortex. The obtained results showed that the passage vortex led to a marked recovery temperature drop at the trailing edge of the 20% blade height profile compared with the other two profiles at all the cascade pressure ratios. The change of the cascade pressure ratio significantly affected the recovery temperature of the 80 % blade height profile compared with the other two profiles. The differences of the recovery temperature distribution on three blade profiles strongly depended on the distribution of the turbine inlet temperature, the action region of the passage vortex and the tip leakage vortex. The OCE of the three profiles showed the different distributions along the mainstream direction. In the radical direction, the averaged OCE was the highest for the S8 profile, followed by the S5 profile, while S2 profile recorded the lowest value. Finally, based on experimental data collected throughout this study, a correlation equation was established pertaining to averaged OCE.
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