Comparison of predicted and experimental nusselt number for a film-cooled rotating blade

Abstract

The predictions from a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes code have been compared to the Nusselt number data obtained on a film-cooled, rotating turbine blade. The blade chosen is the ACE rotor with five rows containing 93 film cooling holes covering the entire span. This is the only film-cooled rotating blade over which experimental heat transfer data is available for the present comparison. Over 2.25 million grid points are used to compute the flow over the blade. Usually in a film cooling computation on a stationary blade, the computational domain is just one spanwise pitch of the film-cooling holes, with periodic boundary conditions in the span direction. However, for a rotating blade, the computational domain consists of the entire blade span from hub to tip, as well as the tip clearance region. As far as the authors are aware of. the present work offers the first comparison of the prediction of surface heat transfer using a three dimensional CFD code with film injection and the measured heat flux on a fully film-cooled rotating transonic turbine blade. In a detailed comparison with the measured data on the suction surface, a reasonably good comparison is obtained, particularly near the hub section. On the pressure surface, however, the comparison between the data and the prediction is poor. A potential reason for the discrepancy on the pressure surface could be the presence of unsteady effects due to stator-rotor interaction in the experiments which are not modeled in the present numerical computations.