Computational Analysis of Surface Curvature Effect on Mist Film-Cooling Performance

Abstract

Air-film cooling has been widely employed to cool gas turbine hot components, such as combustor liners, combustor transition pieces, turbine vanes, and blades. Studies with flat surfaces show that significant enhancement of air-film cooling can be achieved by injecting water droplets with diameters of 5–10 μm into the coolant airflow. The mist/air-film cooling on curved surfaces needs to be studied further. Numerical simulation is adopted to investigate the curvature effect on mist/air-film cooling, specifically the film cooling near the leading edge and on the curved surfaces. Water droplets are injected as dispersed phase into the coolant air and thus exchange mass, momentum, and energy with the airflow. Simulations are conducted for both 2D and 3D settings at low laboratory and high operating conditions. With a nominal blowing ratio of 1.33, air-only adiabatic film-cooling effectiveness on the curved surface is lower than on a flat surface. The concave (pressure) surface has a better cooling effectiveness than the convex (suction) surface, and the leading-edge film cooling has the lowest performance due to the main flow impinging against the coolant injection. By adding 2% (weight) mist, film-cooling effectiveness can be enhanced approximately 40% at the leading edge, 60% on the concave surface, and 30% on the convex surface. The leading edge film cooling can be significantly affected by changing of the incident angle due to startup or part-load operation. The film cooling coverage could switch from the suction side to the pressure side and leave the surface of the other part unprotected by the cooling film. Under real gas turbine operating conditions at high temperature, pressure, and velocity, mist-cooling enhancement could reach up to 20% and provide a wall cooling of approximately 180 K.