Gas turbines overall efficiency enhancement requires further increasing of the firing temperature and decreasing of cooling flow usage. Multi-Hole (or effusion, full coverage) film cooling is widely used for hot gas path components cooling in modern gas turbines.
The present study focused on the adiabatic film effectiveness measurement of a round multi-hole flat plate coupon. The measurements were conducted in a subsonic open loop wind tunnel with a generic setup to cover different running conditions. The test conditions were characterized by a constant main flow Mach number of 0.1 with constant gas temperature. Adiabatic film effectiveness was measured by Pressure Sensitive Paint (PSP) through mass transfer analogy. CO2 was used as the coolant to reach the density ratio of 1.5. Rig CFD simulation was conducted to evaluate impact of inlet boundary layer on testing.
Experimental data covers blowing ratios (BR) at 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 and 2.0. Both 2D maps and lateral average profiles clearly indicated that film effectiveness increases with increasing BR for BR<0.8 and decreases with increasing BR for BR>0.8. This observation agreed with coolant jet behavior of single film row, i.e. attached, detached then reattached, and fully detached. PSP data quality was then discussed in detail for validating Large Eddy Simulation in Part 2.