Heat Transfer on a Film-Cooled Blade: Effect of Hole Physics

A multiblock, three-dimensional Navier Stokes code has been used to study the within-hole and near-hole physics in relation to heat transfer on a film-cooled blade. The flow domain consists of the coolant flow through the plenum and hole-pipes for the three staggered rows of shower-head holes on the VKI rotor, and the main flow over the blade. A multiblock grid is generated that is nearly orthogonal to the various surfaces. It may be noted that for the VKI rotor the shower-head holes are inclined at 30 deg to the spanwise direction, and are normal to the streamwise direction on the blade. Wilcox's k-omega turbulence model is used. The present study provides a much better comparison for the span-averaged heat transfer coefficient on the blade surface with the experimental data than an earlier analysis wherein coolant velocity and temperature distributions were specified at the hole exits rather than extending the computational domain into the hole-pipe and plenum. Details of the distributions of coolant velocity, temperature, k and omega at the hole exits are also presented.