Novel Focal Sweep Strategy for Optical Aerothermal Measurements of Film-Cooled Gas Turbine Blades With Highly Inclined Viewing Angle

Abstract

The viewing angle for optical aerothermal measurements on turbine surfaces is often limited by the turbine structure, requiring the optical system to have a large depth of field (DoF). Although the DoF can be increased by decreasing the lens aperture, this approach is impractical as a large aperture is essential to maintain an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To solve these problems in the optical aerothermal measurements of film-cooled gas turbine blades, an approach combining the focal-sweep method and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is proposed. The focal-sweep method is used to obtain all-in-focus images at an inclined viewing angle, following which the two-dimensional image is restored through 3D reconstruction. Thus, 3D point clouds with both a large DoF and high SNR can be produced. The developed method was validated via flat-plate film cooling experiments using pressure-sensitive paint at three blowing ratios of 0.4, 0.8, and 1.2, as well as three viewing angles. The measured adiabatic effectiveness contours demonstrate that the proposed method can produce all-in-focus measurements at highly inclined viewing angles, albeit at the price of slightly higher noise. In flat-plate experiments, the maximum relative difference is measured to be 6% between results obtained by conventional method at normal view and the proposed method at highly inclined view. Furthermore, the proposed method was applied to the turbine blade cascade film cooling experiment at a highly inclined viewing angle, and successfully reconstructed the 3D point cloud of the cooling effectiveness at the curved turbine blade surface.