COMPUTATIONAL INVESTIGATION OF GAS TURBINE BLADE COOLING

Abstract

The nozzle guide vanes are subjected to the highest temperature of the gas coming out of the combustor in a gas turbine engine. One method used to cool the vanes are to use rows of film cooling holes to inject cooled air bled from the compressor lower pressure stage. The main purpose of this project is to investigate computationally the film cooling phenomena in gas turbine vane cascade. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used for the simulation of the aerothermodynamics of film cooling. Two types of holes have been investigated; simple cylindrical hole and fan-shaped hole. Initially a three dimensional cascade with film cooling holes and plenum chamber was developed, but due to the limitation of computational resources the model was aborted and then a two dimension model was investigated. The modeling of the domain has been done in Gambit 2.0.1. Unstructured grid (quad-pave scheme) was used for the solver. The solver used for the CFD simulation was FluentTM 6.0.1. ...