Velocity and Turbulence Intensity Profiles Downstream of a Long Reach Endwall Double Row of Film Cooling Holes in a Gas Turbine Combustor Representative Environment

The continuous demand from the airlines for reduced jet engine fuel consumption results in increasingly challenging high pressure turbine nozzle guide vane (NGV) working conditions. The capability to reproduce realistic boundary conditions in a rig at the combustor-turbine interaction plane is a key feature when testing NGVs in an engine-representative environment. A large scale linear cascade rig to investigate NGV leading edge cooling systems has been designed with particular attention being paid to creating engine representative conditions at the inlet to the NGVs. The combustor simulator replicates the main features of a rich-burn design including large dilution jets and extensive endwall film cooling. A three-dimensional computational domain including the entire combustor simulator has been created and RANS CFD simulations have been run in order to match Reynolds number and mainstream-to-coolant momentum flux ratio; velocity and turbulence measurements have been acquired at the NGV inlet plane at ambient temperature. In this engine-representative environment the authors focused their attention on the flow field downstream of different endwall film cooling holes configurations: three arrangements of a double row of staggered cylindrical holes (lateral pitch-to-diameter ratio of 2–3–6) and one with intersecting holes (intersecting angle of 90°) are experimentally and numerically analyzed. Velocity, turbulence intensity and integral length scales are predicted and measured for a density ratio of 1 and coolant-to-mainstream momentum flux of 6. A hot wire sensor was mounted on a two-axis traverse mechanism able to move the probe in the spanwise and lateral directions. Three slots allowed to reposition the traverse and take measurements at three downstream locations (stream-wise distance-to-diameter ratio of 4.2–9.2–14.2). The research confirmed the strong influence of the endwall coolant on the flow field at the NGV inlet plane and the hole spacing results a key parameter in managing the film development. Closer-spaced hole configurations can assure an effective film coverage. The integral length scales are strongly connected to the hole diameter and spacing. Intersecting holes can potentially reduce the amount of required coolant at a fixed pressure ratio, but they offer worst film performance than cylindrical holes. RANS simulations proved to be able to get the main trends shown by the measurements.