Improved film cooling performance and coolant flow usage have a significant effect on overall engine performance. In the current study, film cooling performance of an improved antivortex or tripod hole geometry is evaluated on a flat plate surface with steady-state IR (infrared thermography) technique and compared to traditional baseline geometry. The baseline geometry is a simple cylindrical hole design inclined at 30 deg from the surface with pitch-to-diameter ratio of 3.0. The proposed improvement is a tripod design where the two side holes, also of the same diameter, branch out from the root of the main hole at 15 deg angle with a larger pitch-to-diameter ratio of 6.0 between the main holes. The third geometry studied is the same tripod design embedded in a trench to enhance two-dimensional film performance. The mainstream Reynolds number is 3110 based on the coolant hole inlet diameter. Two secondary fluids, air and carbon dioxide, were used to study the effects of coolant-to-mainstream density ratio (DR = 0.95 and 1.45) on film cooling effectiveness. Several blowing ratios in the range 0.5–4.0 were investigated independently at the two density ratios. Results indicate significant improvement in effectiveness with the tripod holes compared to cylindrical holes at all the blowing ratios studied. The trenched design shows improved effectiveness in the trench region and reduced effectiveness in the downstream region. At any given blowing ratio, the tripod hole designs use 50% less coolant and provide at least 30%–40% overall averaged higher cooling effectiveness. The use of relatively dense secondary fluid improves effectiveness immediately downstream of the antivortex holes but leads to poor performance downstream.

Film cooling performance of the antivortex (AV) hole has been well documented for a flat plate. The goal of this study is to evaluate the same over an airfoil at three different locations: leading edge suction and pressure surface and midchord suction surface. The airfoil is a scaled up first stage vane from GE E3 engine and is mounted on a low-speed linear cascade wind tunnel. Steady-state infrared (IR) technique was employed to measure the adiabatic film cooling effectiveness. The study has been divided into two parts: the initial part focuses on the performance of the antivortex tripod hole compared to the cylindrical (CY) hole on the leading edge. Effects of blowing ratio (BR) and density ratio (DR) on the performance of cooling holes are studied here. Results show that the tripod hole clearly provides higher film cooling effectiveness than the baseline cylindrical hole case with overall reduced coolant usage on the both pressure and suction sides of the airfoil. The second part of the study focuses on evaluating the performance on the midchord suction surface. While the hole designs studied in the first part were retained as baseline cases, two additional geometries were also tested. These include cylindrical and tripod holes with shaped (SH) exits. Film cooling effectiveness was found at four different blowing ratios. Results show that the tripod holes with and without shaped exits provide much higher film effectiveness than cylindrical and slightly higher effectiveness than shaped exit holes using 50% lesser cooling air while operating at the same blowing ratios. Effectiveness values up to 0.2–0.25 are seen 40-hole diameters downstream for the tripod hole configurations, thus providing cooling in the important trailing edge portion of the airfoil.

Detailed Nusselt number distributions are presented for a gas turbine engine similar internal channel geometry used for cooling a modern first stage rotor blade. The cooling design has one leading edge channel and a three-pass channel that covers the rest of the blade. The simulated model, generated from the midspan section of an actual cooling circuit, was studied for wall heat transfer coefficient measurements using the transient liquid crystal technique. The model wall inner surfaces were sprayed with thermochromic liquid crystals, and a transient test was used to obtain the local heat transfer coefficients from the measured color change. Results are presented for a nominal channel inlet leading edge channel Reynolds number of 10,700 and a channel inlet three-pass channel Reynolds number of 25,500. Detailed heat transfer measurements are presented for the simulated leading edge, first pass, second pass and third pass interior walls for different rib configurations. The channels were studied for smooth, 90 deg ribs, and angled ribs geometries in addition to ribs on the divider walls between adjacent passages. Overall pressure drop measurements were also obtained for each passage. Some of these results are compared with the predicted heat transfer from standard correlations used in design practices. Results show very complicated heat transfer behavior in these realistic channels compared to results obtained in simplistic geometry channels from published studies. In some cases, the Nusselt numbers predicted by correlations are 50–60% higher than obtained from the current experiments.

The effect of hole exit shaping on both heat transfer coefficient and film cooling effectiveness of tripod injection holes is examined experimentally on a flat plate. Previously, it has been clearly proven that tripod hole configurations provide at least 50–60% more cooling effectiveness while using 50% less coolant than standard cylindrical and shaped hole exit geometries. Temperature data is collected using infrared thermography at different operating conditions to determine the benefit of shaping the hole exits for an already proven tripod hole configuration. The test rig consists of a rectangular test section with a main stream flow at 7.9 m/s and coolant flow injected through the bottom surface through the film cooling injection holes. A unique transient IR technique has been used to determine both the adiabatic film effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient from a single test. Two different exit shaping have been considered, one with a 5° flare and layback and one with a 10° flare and layback. Results show that exit shaping improves the performance of these tripod holes compared to the cylindrical hole exits. The 10° flare and layback exit performs slightly better than the 5° flare and layback exit.

Film cooling performance of two hole geometries is evaluated on a flat plate surface with steady-state IR (infrared thermography) technique. The base geometry is a simple cylindrical hole design inclined at 30° from the surface with pitch-to-diameter ratio of 3.0. The second geometry is an anti-vortex design where the two side holes, also of the same diameter, branch out from the root at 15° angle. The pitch-to-diameter ratio is 6.0 between the main holes. The mainstream Reynolds number is 3110 based on the coolant hole diameter. Two secondary fluids — air and carbon-dioxide — were used to study the effects of coolant-to-mainstream density ratio (DR = 0.95 and 1.45) on film cooling effectiveness. Several blowing ratios in the range 0.5 –4.0 were investigated independently at the two density ratios. Results indicate significant improvement in effectiveness with anti-vortex holes compared to cylindrical holes at all the blowing ratios studied. At any given blowing ratio, the anti-vortex hole design uses 50% less coolant and provides at least 30–40% higher cooling effectiveness. The use of relatively dense secondary fluid improves effectiveness immediately downstream of the anti-vortex holes but leads to poor performance downstream.

In this study, effect of breakout angle of side holes from the main hole in a tripod hole design on film cooling performance is evaluated on a flat plate surface with steady-state IR (infrared thermography) technique. The designs are compared a cylindrical hole design inclined at 30° from the surface with pitch-to-diameter ratio of 3.0 and a shaped hole design, which is identical to the cylindrical hole design with the addition of adding a 10° flare and laydown to the exit on the mainstream surface. The two tripod hole designs are one where the two side holes, also of the same diameter, branch from the root at a 15° angle while maintaining the same 30° inclination as the cylindrical and shaped designs witha pitch-to-diameter ratio between the main holes for this design is 6.0. The other tripod hole design is a modified tripod hole design that increases the branch angle to 30°, which has the added effect of increasing the pitch-to-diameter ratio between the main holes to 7.5. Two secondary fluids — air and carbon-dioxide — were used to study the effects of coolant-to-mainstream density ratio (DR = 0.95 and 1.45) on film cooling effectiveness. Several blowing ratios in the range 0.5–4.0 were investigated independently at the two density ratios. Results show that the tripod hole design provides similar film cooling effectiveness as the shaped hole case with overall reduced coolant usage. Increasing the breakout angle from 15° to 30° reduces overall cooling effectiveness but increases jet-to-jet interactions.

Tripod hole film cooling designs can provide improved cooling with reduced coolant usage. It is essential to determine the impact of strong cooling near hole locations due to increased thermal gradients around the hole region. In this paper, efforts have been made to predict the same using a numerical analysis. Local temperature distribution on the blade surface causes different rates of expansion, resulting in a differential strain, furthering the impact of the numerical study and creating a need to understand the thermo-mechanical behavior of blade design. The thermal stresses that are generated near the film cooling holes are compared for different cooling hole shapes and eventually weigh the thermal advantage of a tripod hole over the cylindrical standard design. Standard k-ε was used to validate the CFD results, ensuring by a fine mesh of 5 million tetrahedrons. Validation includes comparison of the experimental results, with a numerical one where similar blade material and working temperatures are used. Upon validation, CFD was run again at engine temperature conditions with Haynes230 alloy as the blade material. Surface temperature contour enabled structural analysis using a finite element approach. Equivalent stresses (Von-Mises stresses) on the blade emerging from the analysis provided more information about stress dependency on blowing ratio.

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