Cooling Effectiveness for a Shaped Film Cooling Hole at a Range of Compound Angles

Abstract

Shaped film cooling holes are a well-established cooling technique used in gas turbines to keep component metal temperatures in an acceptable range. One of the goals of film cooling is to reduce the driving temperature for convection at the wall, the success of which is generally represented by the film cooling adiabatic effectiveness. However, the introduction of a film cooling jet-in-crossflow, especially if it is oriented at a compound angle, can augment the convective heat transfer coefficient and dominate the flowfield. This work aims to understand the effect that a compound angle has on the flowfield and adiabatic effectiveness of a shaped film cooling hole. Five orientations of the public 7–7–7 shaped film cooling hole were tested, from a streamwise-oriented hole (0 deg compound angle) to a 60 deg compound angle hole, in increments of 15 deg. Additionally, two pitchwise spacings of P/D = 3 and 6 were tested to examine the effect of hole-to-hole interaction. All cases were tested at a density ratio of 1.2 and blowing ratios ranging from 1.0 to 4.0. The experimental results show that increasing compound angle leads to increased lateral spread of coolant and enables higher laterally averaged effectiveness at high-blowing ratios. A smaller pitchwise spacing leads to more complete coverage of the endwall and has higher laterally averaged effectiveness even when normalized by coverage ratio, suggesting that hole to hole interaction is important for compound angled holes. Steady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was not able to capture the exact effectiveness levels, but did predict many of the observed trends. The lateral motion of the coolant jet was also quantified, both from the experimental data and the CFD prediction, and as expected, holes with a higher compound angle and higher blowing ratio have greater lateral motion, which generally also promotes hole-to-hole interaction.