Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Trailing Edge Film Cooling by Circular Coolant Wall Jets Ejected From a Slot With Internal Rib Arrays

The present study concentrates on the experimental and computational investigation of a cooled trailing edge in a modern turbine blade. The trailing edge features a pressure side cutback and a slot, stiffened by two rows of evenly spaced ribs in an inline configuration. Cooling air is ejected through the slot and forms a cooling film on the trailing edge cutback region. In the present configuration the lateral spacing of the ribs equals two times their width. The height of the ribs, i.e. the height of the slot equals their width. Since the ribs are provided with fillet radii of half the slot height in size, circular coolant jets are exiting the slot tangentially to the trailing edge cutback. The adiabatic wall temperature mappings on the trailing edge cutback indicate that strong three-dimensional flow interaction between the coolant jets and the hot main flow takes place in such a way that two or more coolant jets coalesce depending on the blowing ratio. Experimental and numerical data to be presented in the present study include adiabatic film cooling effectiveness on the trailing edge cutback, the pressure distribution along the internal ribbed passage as well as slot discharge coefficients for different blowing ratios ranging from M = 0.35 to 1.1.