Heat Transfer Enhancement for Gas Turbine Internal Cooling by Application of Double Swirl Cooling Chambers

Improvement of the gas turbine thermal efficiency can be achieved by reducing the cooling fluid amount in internal cooling channels with enhanced convective cooling. Nowadays the state of the art internal cooling technology for thermally high-loaded gas turbine blades consists of multiple serpentine-shaped cooling channels with angled ribs. Besides, huge effort is put on the development of more advanced internal cooling configurations with further internal heat transfer enhancements. Swirl chamber flow configurations, in which air is flowing through a pipe with a swirling motion generated by tangential jet inlet, have a potential for application as such advanced technology. This paper presents the validation of numerical results for a standard swirl chamber, which has been investigated experimentally in a reference publication. The numerical results obtained with application of the SST k-ω model show the best agreement with the experiment data in compare with other turbulence models. It has been found at the inlet region that the augmentation of the heat transfer is nearly seven times larger than the fully developed non-swirl flow. Within the further numerical study, another cooling configuration named Double Swirl Chambers (DSC) has been obtained and investigated. The numerical results are compared to the reference case. With the same boundary conditions and Reynolds number, the heat transfer coefficients are higher for the DSC configuration than for the reference configuration. In particular at the inlet region, the DSC configuration has even higher circumferentially averaged heat transfer enhancement in one section by approximately 41%. The globally-averaged heat transfer enhancement in DSC configuration is 34.5% higher than the value in the reference SC configuration. This paper presents the configuration of the DSC as an alternative internal cooling technology and explains its major physical phenomena, which are the reasons for the improvement of internal heat transfer.Copyright © 2013 by ASME