Overall Cooling Effectiveness With Internal Serpentine Channels and Optimized Film Cooling Holes

Abstract

The overall cooling effectiveness for gas turbine airfoils is a function of the combined cooling due to internal cooling configurations and film cooling configurations. Typically, film cooling configurations are evaluated independent of the cooling effects of the internal feed channels, generally based on adiabatic effectiveness measurements. In this study, we consider the coupled effects of internal cooling and film cooling configurations through measurements of overall cooling effectiveness for film cooling holes fed by a coflow/counterflow channel and a serpentine channel. A film cooling hole designed by adjoint optimization techniques (X-AOpt) is compared to a standard-shaped hole with 7 deg forward and lateral expansions (7-7-7 SI). Experiments without film cooling showed that the serpentine channel had 35–50% greater overall cooling effectiveness than the straight, coflow channel. Experiments with the X-AOpt hole combined with a serpentine channel showed an area-averaged overall cooling effectiveness of ϕ¯¯=0.58, which was a 70% increase compared to the overall cooling effectiveness of the serpentine channel without film cooling. When the X-AOpt hole was fed with a coflow channel with similar coolant mass flowrate, the overall cooling effectiveness was ϕ¯¯=0.44, i.e., 30% lower than when using the serpentine channel. Interestingly, adiabatic effectiveness measurements with the X-AOpt holes showed a more uniform hole-to-hole performance when using the serpentine channel compared to the coflow channel.