Experimental Study of Surface Roughness Effects on a Turbine Airfoil in a Linear Cascade: Part I—External Heat Transfer

The present experimental study is part of a comprehensive heat transfer analysis on a highly loaded low pressure turbine blade and endwall with varying surface roughness. Whereas a former paper [1] focused on full span heat transfer of a smooth airfoil and surface roughness effects on the endwall, in this work further measurements at the airfoil midspan with different deterministic surface roughness are considered. Part I investigates the external heat transfer enhancement due to rough surfaces whereas part II focuses on surface roughness effects on aerodynamic losses. A set of different arrays of deterministic roughness is investigated in these experiments, varying the height and eccentricity of the roughness elements, showing the combined influence of roughness height and anisotropy of the rough surfaces on laminar to turbulent transition and the turbulent boundary layer as well as boundary layer separation on the pressure and suction side. It is shown that — besides the known effect of roughness height — eccentricity of roughness plays a major role in the onset of transition and the turbulent heat transfer. The experiments are conducted at several free-stream turbulence levels (Tu₁ = 1.4% to 10.1%) and different Reynolds numbers.