Enhancing the efectiveness of film cooling

Advanced gas turbine stages are designed to operate at increasingly higher inlet temperatures to increase thermal efficiency and specific power output.To maintain durability and reasonable life,film cooling is needed in addition to internal cooling,especially for the first stage.Film cooling lowers material temperature by forced convection inside film-cooling holes and by forming a layer of coolant about component surfaces to insulate them from the hot gases.Unfortunately,each cooling jet forms a pair of counter-rotating vortices that entrains hot gas and causes the film-cooling jet to lift off from the surface that it is intended to protect.This paper gives an overview of efforts to enhance the effectiveness of film-cooling.This paper also describes two new design concepts.One design concept seeks to minimize the entrainment of hot gases underneath of film-cooling jets by using flow-aligned blockers.The other design concept shifts the interaction between the approaching hot gas and the cooling jet to occur further above the surface by using an upstream ramp.For both design concepts,computational fluid dynamics results are presented to examine their usefulness in enhancing film-cooling effectiveness.