Experimental Evaluation of Cooling Effectiveness of High Pressure Turbine Nozzle Guide Vane

High pressure turbine nozzle guide vane of a gas turbine engine, which operates at gas temperatures in excess of 1700 K, employs internal cooling, augmented convective cooling, impingement cooling and film cooling techniques to keep the vane in safe operating limits. Even though nozzle guide vanes are designed using heat transfer co-relations available in published papers and fundamental data, it is required to test the nozzle guide vane to ascertain the surface metal temperature and verify the adequacy of cooling. Adequacy of cooling is quantified by the term cooling effectiveness expressed and as percentage. The objective of the current work is to study the effect of gas to cooling air temperature ratio on cooling effectiveness. In the current study tests were first conducted to validate the test cascade in accordance with AGARD recommendations. Later tests were conducted to verify the constancy of cooling effectiveness across two gas temperatures and finally effect of gas to cooling air temperature ratio on cooling effectiveness was studied. The ratio was increased by a factor of 0.69 in leading edge and 0.72 in the trailing edge circuit and found that the cooling effectiveness remained constant.