Heat Transfer Boundary Condition Waveforms on a Turbine Blade Leading Edge With Unsteady Film Cooling

It is necessary to understand how film cooling both reduces the adiabatic wall temperature and influences the heat transfer coefficient in order to predict the net heat flux to a gas turbine hot gas path component. Although a great number of studies have considered steady film cooling flows, the influence of film cooling unsteadiness has only recently been considered. Unsteadiness in the freestream flow or the coolant flow can cause fluctuations in both the adiabatic effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient, the dynamics of which have been difficult to measure. In previous studies, only time averaged effects have been measured. The present study has determined time resolved adiabatic effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient waveforms using a novel inverse heat transfer methodology. Unsteady film cooling was examined on the leading edge region of a circular cylinder simulating the leading edge of a turbine blade. Unsteady interactions between h and η, were examined near a coolant hole located 21.5° downstream from the leading edge stagnation line, angled 20° to the surface and 90° to the streamwise direction. The coolant plume is shown to shift back and forth as the jet’s momentum fluctuates. Increasing freestream turbulence was found to both reduce η, and the amplitude of the η waveforms.