A full scale, three vane, four passage, first stage stator segment from a Westinghouse W501D engine was tested in the vane cooling cascade rig at the Combustion Turbine Systems Division Development Center in Concordville, Pennsylvania. The cascade facility operates with air preheated to engine compressor discharge conditions, and it is fired with a standard combustor and nozzle assembly so that engine design vane inlet temperatures and pressures may be obtained with realistic free stream turbulence levels. The vanes are cooled internally by impingement inserts over most of the surface, and with pin fins in the trailing edge region. External film cooling is introduced by discrete jets over most of the suction surface and over the aft portion of the pressure surface. The flow to each insert was individually controlled and measured for the test.
Tests were run over a range of cascade pressures, temperatures, and Reynolds’ numbers. The vanes were instrumented to obtain metal temperatures, internal cooling air temperatures and pressures, and gas path static pressure near the film cooling holes. Measured metal temperatures were compared to analytical predictions over the range of test conditions. Since internal heat transfer relations had been obtained by model tests, a good correlation between measured and predicted temperatures verified the gas path side heat transfer coefficients used in the design and analysis.
