Design of Full-Scale Endwall Film Cooling of a Turbine Vane

Abstract

Endwall film cooling is a significant cooling method to protect the endwall region and the junction region of endwall and a turbine vane, where usually a relatively high temperature load exists. This work aims to find the optimized arrangement of film cooling holes on the endwall and improve the film cooling in some difficult regions on the endwall, such as pressure side-endwall junction region. Several ideas for film cooling hole arrangement design are proposed, based on the pressure coefficient distribution, the streamline distribution, and the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) distribution, respectively. Four specified designs are built and compared. The results are obtained by numerical calculations with a well-validated turbulence model, the k–ω shear stress transport (SST) model. From this work, the designs based on the pressure coefficient distribution (designs 1 and 2) force the flow from the pressure side to the suction side (SS), especially in design 2, which adopts compound angle holes. The designs based on pressure coefficients have benefit in the cooling of the SS but give worse coolant coverage on the pressure side. In addition, designs 1 and 2 have little influence on the original pressure field. The design based on the streamline distributions (design 3) has larger coolant coverage on the endwall and provides good coolant coverage on the endwall and pressure side junction region. The design based on the HTC distribution provides large overall film cooling effectiveness on both the pressure side and the SS. More film cooling holes are placed on the high temperature regions, which is more effective in practice.