Heat management is an essential part of combustor design, as operating temperatures within the combustor generally exceed safe working temperatures of the materials employed in its construction. Two principal methods used to manage this heat are impingement and film cooling. Impingement heat transfer refers to jets of impinging fluid delivered by orifices integrated into internal structures in order to remove undesired heat. This mode of heat transfer has a relatively high effectiveness, making it an attractive method of heat management. As such, a considerable number of studies have been done on the subject providing a substantial body of useful knowledge. However, there are innovative cooling configurations being used in gas turbines which generate compressibility and temperature ratio effects on heat transfer which are currently unexplored. Presented here are data showing that these effects have a significant impact on heat transfer and new correlations are presented to account for temperature ratio and Mach number effects for a range of conditions. These findings are significant and can be applied to impinging flows in other areas of a gas turbine engine such as turbine blades and vanes. Film cooling refers to the injection of coolant onto a surface through an array of sharply angled holes. This is done in a manner that allows the coolant to remain close to the surface where it provides an insulating layer between the hot gas freestream and the cooler surface. In order to improve turbine efficiency, research efforts in film cooling are directed at reducing film cooling flow without decreasing turbine inlet temperatures. Both impingement cooling and film cooling are heavily utilized in combustor liners. Frequently, cooling air first impinges against the back side of the liner, then the spent impingement fluid passes through film cooling holes. This arrangement combines the convective heat transfer of the impinging jets convection as the coolant passes through the film cooling holes and the benefits that come from having a thin film of cool air between the combustor wall and the combustion products. In order to improve the understanding of internal cooling in gas turbine engines, the influence of previously unexplored physical parameters such as compressible flow effects and temperature ratio in impingement flows and variable blowing ratio in a film cooling array must be examined. Prior to this work, there existed in the available literature only an extremely limited exploration of compressibility effects in impingement heat transfer and the results of separately examining the effects of Mach number and Reynolds number. The film cooling literature provides no information for a full array of film cooling holes along a contraction at high blowing ratios. Exploring these effects and conditions adds to the body of available data and allows the validation of numerical predictions.

While the gas turbine research community is continuously pursuing development of higher cyclic efficiency designs by increasing the combustor firing temperatures and thermally resistant turbine vane / blade materials, a simultaneous effort to reduce the emission levels of high temperature driven thermal NOX also needs to be addressed. Lean premixed combustion has been found as one of the solutions to these objectives. However, since less amount of air is available for backside cooling of liner walls, it becomes very important to characterize the convective heat transfer that occurs on the inside wall of the combustor liners. These studies were explored using laboratory scale experiments as well as numerical approaches for several inlet flow conditions under both non-reacting and reacting flows. These studies may be expected to provide valuable insights for the industrial design communities towards identifying thermal hot spot locations as well as in quantifying the heat transfer magnitude, thus aiding in effective designs of the liner walls. Lean premixed gas turbine combustor flows involve strongly coupled interactions between several aspects of physics such as the degree of swirl imparted by the inlet fuel nozzle, premixing of the fuel and incoming air, lean premixed combustion within the combustor domain, the interaction of swirling flow with combustion driven heat release resulting in flow dilation, the resulting pressure fluctuations leading to thermo-acoustic instabilities there by creating a feedback loop with incoming reactants resulting in flow instabilities leading to flame lift off, flame extinction etc. Hence understanding combustion driven swirling flow in combustors continues to be a topic of intense research. In the present study, numerical predictions of swirl driven combustor flows were analyzed for a specific swirl number of an industrial fuel nozzle (swirler) using a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool and compared against in-house experimental data. The latter data was obtained from a newly developed test rig at Applied Propulsion and Power Laboratory (APPL) at Virginia Tech. The simulations were performed and investigated for several flow Reynolds numbers under non-reacting condition using various two equation turbulence models as well as a scale resolving model. The work was also extended to reacting flow modeling (using a partially premixed model) for a specific Reynolds number. These efforts were carried out in order investigate the flow behavior and also characterize convective heat transfer along the combustor wall (liner). Additionally, several parametric studies were performed towards investigating the effect of combustor geometry on swirling flow and liner hear transfer; and also to investigate the effect of inlet swirl on the jet impingement location along the liner wall under both non-reacting as well as reacting conditions. The numerical results show detailed comparison against experiments for swirling flow profiles within the combustor under reacting conditions indicating a good reliability of steady state modeling approaches for reacting conditions; however, the limitations of steady state RANS turbulence models were observed for non-reacting swirling flow conditions, where the flow profiles deviate from experimental observations in the central recirculation region. Also, the numerical comparison of liner wall heat transfer characteristics against experiments showed a sensitivity to Reynolds numbers. These studies offer to provide preliminary insights of RANS predictions based on commercial CFD tools in predicting swirling, non-reacting and reacting flow and heat transfer. They can be extended to reacting flow heat transfer studies in future and also may be upgraded to unsteady LES predictions to complement future experimental observations conducted at the in-house test facility. / Ph. D.