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Advanced cooling techniques are required to increase the Brayton cycle temperature ratio necessary for the increase of the overall cycle's efficiency. Current turbine components are cooled with an array of internal cooling channels in the midchord section of the blade, pin fin arrays at the trailing edge and impingement channels in the leading edge. Impingement channels provide the designer with high convective coefficients on the target surface. Increasing the heat transfer coefficient of these channels has been a subject of research for the past 20 years. In the current study, a triple row impingement channel is studied with a jet to target spacing of 6, 8 and 10. The effects of sidewalls are also analyzed. Temperature sensitive paint alongside thin foil heaters are used to obtain heat transfer distributions throughout the target and side walls of the three different channels. Thermal performances were also calculated for the two largest channels. It was found that the side walls provide a significant amount of cooling especially when the channels are mounted side by side so that their sidewalls behave as fins. Similar to literature it was found that an increase in Z/D decreases heat transfer coefficient and provides a more uniform profile. It was also found that the Z/D = 6 and 8 target wall heat transfer profiles are very similar, hinting to the fact that successful potential core impingement may have occurred at height of eight diameters. A Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD, study was also performed to provide better insight into the flow field that creates such characteristic heat transfer profiles. The Realizable k-µ solution with enhanced wall functions gave surface heat transfer coefficients 30% off from the experimental data.

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<p>Due to the rapid development of nanophotonics, microring resonators suspended on a membrane holds promises for a scalable optical circuit with strong light-atom interaction. In this dissertation, I introduce a efficiently-coupled microring circuits for on-chip cavity QED with cold atoms and report my experimental efforts to integrate the optical chip into a ultrahigh-vacuum chamber with a magneto-optical trap for Rb atoms. My attempts to load single atoms into optical tweezers are also discussed.</p> <p>  </p> <p>  Although the loading of atom into optical tweezers above the top surface of resonator remains a challenge in experiment, I propose an alternative of cavity cooling based on cavity QED to facilitate the loading of atom into a two-color evanescent field trap around the waveguide. Assuming that the strong interaction between atoms and resonator modes is realized, I theoretically investigate the synthesis via photoassociation and the direct optical detection of a single ground-state cold molecule, whose corresponding excited-state has multiple decay channels. Similarly to the Purcell effect, the decay in a specific decay channel could be enhanced based on cavity QED, and therefore the synthesis efficiency can approach unity when the interaction between the resonator modes and a single cold molecule becomes stronger. In addition, for a single cold molecule without closed optical transition, the electromagnetically induced transparency is possible to be observed on our nanophotonic platform in the case of strong resonator-molecule coupling.</p>

The greenhouses play a key role in food sustainable production, the purpose of the greenhouses is to make an artificial suitable environment to grow different kinds of plants. The cost of energy used in the greenhouses to ensure the optimum temperature, humidity, and CO2 concentration, makes up a large part of the final cost of food. Due to global warming, the successive energy crises, and the food crises, the need to make the greenhouses more energy efficient and to utilize renewable energy resources is rapidly increasing. The enclosed water curtain cooling system meets the special requirement of the greenhouse cooling system, and it has potential energy savings when it is integrated with other systems such as heat pumps, underground water sources, and surplus heat energy recovery. This system involves two special nylon foils, and a thin layer of water flows between the two foils, the two foils will be stuck to eachother by the cohesive force of the water-detergent mixture, the detergent was added to decrease the water surface tension and ensure the even distribution of the water-detergent mixture over the nylon foils. In this study, an experimental model of the enclosed water curtain was made and two sets of tests were conducted, the first set was at room temperature around 20°C, and the second test was at room temperature around 25.7 °C with an electrical heater, each set contains three tests to measure the cooling capacity of the curtain, and each test takes 2 minutes, the curtain dimensions were height and width of 1.04 m and 1.20 m respectively. By measuring the difference between the average inlet and outlet temperature of the water-detergent mixture before and after the curtain, and the mixture mass flow rate during the test period, the cooling capacityof the curtain was calculated using the energy balance equation.It was found that the curtain cooling capacity increases with the increase of ambient temperature, The large heat transfer area of the curtain which allows using higher water temperature for cooling, and the useful features of the water membrane like the high absorption of the wavelength of infrared and the high transparency of the wavelength of visible light, make this system meets the special requirements of the greenhouses cooling system. However, to be able to apply this system in real-life, the design of the curtain should be improved, and suitable materials should be chosen to make it more reliable. Also, All tests in this study were conducted in the workshop in the absence of solar radiation, therefore, the actual performance of the curtain needs to be evaluated with the presence of solar radiation, to be able to study the effects of the direct and diffuse solar radiation with various spectrum range.

In the past few decades, the operating temperatures of gas turbine engines have increased significantly with a view towards increasing the overall thermal efficiency and specific power output. As a result of increased turbine inlet temperatures, the hot gas path components downstream of the combustor section are subjected to high heat loads. Though materials with improved temperature capabilities are used in the construction of the hot gas path components, in order to ensure safe and durable operation, the hot gas path components are additionally supplemented with thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) and sophisticated cooling techniques. The present study focusses on two aspects of gas turbine cooling, namely augmented internal cooling and external film cooling. One of the commonly used methods for cooling the vanes involves passing coolant air bled from the compressor through serpentine passages inside the airfoils. The walls of the internal cooling passages are usually roughened with turbulence promoters like ribs to enhance heat transfer. Though the ribs help in augmenting the heat transfer, they have an associated pressure penalty as well. Therefore, it is important to study the thermal-hydraulic performance of ribbed internal cooling passages. The first section of the thesis deals with the numerical investigation of flow and heat transfer characteristics in a ribbed two-pass channel. Four different rib shapes- 45° angled, V-shaped, W-shaped and M-shaped, were studied. This study further aims at exploring the performance of different rib-shapes at a large rib pitch-to-height ratio (p/e=16) which has potential applications in land-based gas turbines operating at high Reynolds numbers. Detailed flow and heat transfer analysis have been presented to illustrate how the innate flow physics associated with the bend region and the different rib shapes contribute to heat transfer enhancement in the two-pass channel. The bend-induced secondary flows were observed to significantly affect the flow and heat transfer distribution in the 2nd pass. The thermal-hydraulic performance of V-shaped and 45° angled ribs were better than W-shaped and M-shaped ribs. The second section of the study deals with the analysis of film cooling performance of different hole configurations on the endwall upstream of a first stage nozzle guide vane. The flow along the endwall of the airfoils is highly complex, dominated by 3-dimensional secondary flows. The presence of complex secondary flows makes the cooling of the airfoil endwalls challenging. These secondary flows strongly influence endwall film cooling and the associated heat transfer. In this study, three different cooling configurations- slot, cylindrical holes and tripod holes were studied. Steady-state experiments were conducted in a low speed, linear cascade wind tunnel. The adiabatic film cooling effectiveness on the endwall was computed based on the spatially resolved temperature data obtained from the infrared camera. The effect of mass flow ratio on the film cooling performance of the different configurations was also explored. For all the configurations, the coolant jets were unable to overcome the strong secondary flows inside the passage at low mass flow ratios. However, the coolant jets were observed to provide much better film coverage at higher mass flow ratios. In case of cylindrical ejection, the effectiveness values were observed to be very low which could be because of jet lift-off. The effectiveness of tripod ejection was comparable to slot ejection at mass flow ratios between 0.5-1.5, while at higher mass flow ratios, slot ejection was observed to outperform tripod ejection. / Master of Science

Aircraft engine manufacturers strive for greater performance and efficiency by continually increasing the turbine inlet temperature. High turbine inlet temperatures significantly degrade the lifetime of components in the turbine. Modern gas turbines operate with turbine inlet temperatures well above the melting temperature of key turbine components. Without active cooling schemes, modern turbines would fail catastrophically. This study will evaluate a novel cooling scheme for turbine airfoils, called microcircuit cooling, in which small cooling channels are located extremely close to the surface of a turbine airfoil. Coolant bled from the compressor passes through the microcircuits and exits through film cooling slots. On further cooling benefit is that the microcircuit passages are filled with irregular pin fin features that serve to increase convective cooling through the channels. Results from this study indicate a strong interaction between the internal microcircuit features and the external film-cooling from the slot exit. Asymmetric cooling patterns downstream of the slot resulted from the asymmetric pin fin design within the microcircuit. Adiabatic effectiveness levels were found to be optimum for the slot design at a blowing ratio of 0.37. The pin fin arrangement along with the impingement cooling at the microcircuit entrance increased the area-averaged heat transfer by a factor of three, relative to an obstructed channel, over a Reynolds range of 5,000 to 15,000. / Master of Science

M.S.