Review and assessment of the HOST turbine heat transfer program

The objectives of the HOST Turbine Heat Transfer subproject were to obtain a better understanding of the physics of the aerothermodynamic phenomena occurring in high-performance gas turbine engines and to assess and improve the analytical methods used to predict the fluid dynamics and heat transfer phenomena. At the time the HOST project was initiated, an across-the-board improvement in turbine design technology was needed. Therefore, a building-block approach was utilized, with research ranging from the study of fundamental phenomena and analytical modeling to experiments in simulated real-engine environments. Experimental research accounted for 75 percent of the project, and analytical efforts accounted for approximately 25 percent. Extensive experimental datasets were created depicting the three-dimensional flow field, high free-stream turbulence, boundary-layer transition, blade tip region heat transfer, film cooling effects in a simulated engine environment, rough-wall cooling enhancement in a rotating passage, and rotor-stator interaction effects. In addition, analytical modeling of these phenomena was initiated using boundary-layer assumptions as well as Navier-Stokes solutions.