Gas turbine engines are challenged to operate at higher efficiencies, leading to turbine inlet temperatures that exceed turbine material limits. Increased internal cooling efficiency enables higher temperature operation, reduces cooling air injection into the core flow, and mitigates performance penalties from thermal mixing and total pressure loss. Micro Cooling Concepts has developed a turbine vane cooling concept that provides enhanced internal impingement cooling effectiveness via the use of micro-textured impingement surfaces (i.e., grooves and fins). The current effort employs computational models, in conjunction with optimization techniques, to explore the optimal design of these micro-textured surfaces. A computational fluid dynamics model of the vane leading edge was utilized to compute the flow in the vane interior and the temperature distribution in the vane material. A gradient-based optimization routine, implemented in Matlab, varied geometric parameters in an independent manner to minimize the maximum metal temperature in the vane material volume. Four separate design spaces were explored: grooves and fins (both shrouded and unshrouded). It was determined that the shrouded fins and fin design outperformed all others. The maximum external convective free stream temperature obtained was 2600 K while the maximum internal vane temperature remained below 1219 K.
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