Aerodynamic and Aerothermal Investigation of the Flow Around an HPT Rotor Shroud: Heat Transfer and Cooling Effectiveness

An experimental study has been conducted to investigate the aerothermal performance of a shrouded high pressure turbine blade in a large scale rotating rig. The rotor blade and the associated shroud and casing geometry have been modelled in a large scale low speed turbine rig that was designed to investigate a novel passive shroud cooling methodology. The objective of the present paper is to describe the aerothermal performance of a passive shroud cooling strategy using measured heat transfer and adiabatic cooling effectiveness data. Improved physical understanding of the shroud aerodynamics as reported in the companion paper Lehmann et al. [1] will be used here to support the analysis. Highly resolved experimental heat transfer data was acquired on the shroud, the fins and on the shroud underside with the thin heater film method. The distribution of the adiabatic cooling effectiveness on the rotor shroud was measured with a combination of the Ammonia-Diazo and a foreign gas sampling technique. The measurements are complemented by steady numerical computations of the turbine stage. Due to the impact of vortical flow structures in the over shroud cavities, the Nusselt numbers on the shroud top surfaces were found to be of the same order as on the shroud underside. The passive shroud cooling concept was found to provide quite efficient and uniform cooling to the over-shroud surfaces while the distribution of coolant on the shroud underside was significantly affected by the rotor secondary flow.