Buoyancy Effect on Leading Edge Cooling of a Rotating Turbine Blade

Abstract

A numerical study is performed to investigate the effect of buoyancy on the cooling performance of leading edge cooling of a rotating turbine blade under the real operating condition at baseload. The Double swirl cooling (DSC) configuration is simulated using the shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model that proves to be the most accurate for impinging flow under rotating condition due to its lowest averaged second norm. The numerical results reveal that the DSC cooling performance is deteriorated by buoyancy because the total average Nusselt number and the thermal performance factor of DSC with buoyancy effect are significantly lower than those of DSC without buoyancy effect. This points out that the buoyancy effect is a very important parameter to be concerned in the numerical study of leading edge cooling of a rotating turbine blade due to its great influence on the cooling performance and heat transfer distribution.