Combined Experimental and CFD Study of a HP Blade Multi-Pass Cooling System

Progress in the computing power available for CFD predictions now means that full geometry, 3 dimensional predictions are now routinely used in internal cooling system design. This paper reports recent work at Rolls-Royce which has compared the flow and htc predictions in a modern HP turbine cooling system to experiments. The triple pass cooling system includes film cooling vents and inclined ribs. The high resolution heat transfer experiments show that different cooling performance features are predicted with different levels of fidelity by the CFD. The research also revealed the sensitivity of the prediction to accurate modelling of the film cooling hole discharge coefficients and a detailed comparison of the authors’ computer predictions to data available in the literature is reported. Mixed bulk temperature is frequently used in the determination of heat transfer coefficient from experimental data. The current CFD data is used to compare the mixed bulk temperature to the duct centreline temperature. The latter is measured experimentally and the effect of the difference between mixed bulk and centreline temperature is considered in detail.