Investigation of the steam-cooled blade in a steam turbine cascade

With the increasing demand for electricity,an efficiency improvement and thereby reduced CO2 emissions of the coal-fired plants are expected in order to reach the goals set in the Kyoto protocol.It can be achieved by a rise of the process parameters.Currently,live steam pressures and temperatures up to 300 bars and 923 K are planned as the next step.Closed circuit steam cooling of blades and vanes in modern steam turbines is a promising technology in order to establish elevated live steam temperatures in future steam turbine cycles.In this paper,a steam-cooled test vane in a cascade with external hot steam flow is analyzed numerically with the in-house code CHTflow.A parametric analysis aiming to improve the cooling effectiveness is carried out by varying the cooling mass flow ratio.The results from two investigated cases show that the steam cooling technique has a good application potential in the steam turbine.The internal part of the vane is cooled homogeneously in both cases.With the increased cooling mass flow rate,there is a significant improvement of cooling efficiency at the leading edge.The results show that the increased cooling mass flow ratio can enhance the cooling effectiveness at the leading edge.With respect to trailing edge,there is no observable improvement of cooling effectiveness with the increased cooling mass flow.This implies that due to the limited dimension at the trailing edge,the thermal stress cannot be decreased by increasing the cooling mass flow rate.Therefore,impingement-cooling configuration at the trailing edge might be a solution to overcome the critical thermal stress there.It is also observed that the performance of the cooling effective differs on pressure side and suction side.It implicates that the equilibrium of the cooling effectiveness on two sides are influenced by a coupled relationship between cooling mass flow ratio and hole geometry.In future work,optimizing the hole geometry and cooling steam supply conditions might be the solutions for an equivalent cooling effectiveness along whole profile.