Application of Scale Adaptive Simulation Model to Studying Cooling Characteristics of a High Pressure Turbine Blade Cutback Trailing Edge With Different Cooling Configurations

Abstract

Effective cooling structure design in the trailing edge (TE) of a high pressure turbine (HPT) blade is essential to increase turbine efficiency and maintain structural integrity. To obtain efficient cooling structures and understand clearly cooling mechanism, this paper adopted numerical simulation methods to investigate fluid flow and cooling characteristics in detail downstream of an HPT blade TE cutback region. The effects of typical TE configurations on cutback cooling performance are investigated including three types of internal turbulators (cylindrical pin fins and elliptic pin fins arranged in streamwise and spanwise orientations), the cutback with/without land extensions and three kinds of ejection lip profiles (one straight lip shape marked as “A” and two rounded lip shapes marked as “B” and “C,” respectively). The scale adaptive simulation (SAS) is implemented to study the complex unsteady mixing process downstream of the cutback under operating condition of blowing ratio M = 0.65. The results from the shear stress transport (SST) k–ω model are compared as well. SAS is capable to reproduce the periodical vortex shedding phenomena and resolve the vortices coherent structures. Compared with the experimental data, SAS provides more accurate predictions in terms of laterally averaged adiabatic cooling effectiveness ηaw and discharge coefficient Cd than the SST k–ω model. At the rear part of the cutback surface, large deterioration in ηaw is predicted by SAS for all configurations, but ηaw is considerably overpredicted by the SST k–ω model except for the case of elliptic pin fins with spanwise orientation. The elliptic pin fins with streamwise orientation significantly improve ηaw at the rear part of the cutback surface over the baseline model with cylindrical pin fins and slightly increase Cd. However, the elliptic pin fins with spanwise orientation drastically reduce the ηaw and Cd. Downstream of the cutback, the coherent structures are strongly disturbed and become chaotic compared with the TE with cylindrical and streamwise oriented elliptic pin fins. The application of land extensions only causes an evident change to the coherent structure immediate downstream of the lip and slightly improves ηaw and reduces Cd over the baseline model at the rear part of the cutback surface. Rounded lip shapes B and C also show an obvious increase in ηaw at the rear part of the cutback surface but only a minor increase in Cd compared with the straight lip shape A. The rounded lip helps the coolant diffuse into the TE cutback and reduce the intensity of mixing. Due to larger rounding radius of shape B, the cooling effectiveness predicted by shape B is slightly better than shape C.