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Effects of high intensity, large-scale free-stream turbulence on combustor effusion cooling

Full-coverage or effusion cooling is commonly used in the thermal management of gas turbine combustion systems. The combustor environment is characterised by highly turbulent free-stream conditions and relatively large turbulent length scales. This turbulent flow field is predominantly created by the upstream fuel injector for lean burn systems. In rich burn systems the turbulent flow field is augmented further by the addition of dilution ports. The available evidence suggests that large energetic eddies interact strongly with the injected coolant fluid and may have a significant impact on the film-cooling performance. The desire to create compact low-emission combustion systems with improved specific fuel consumption, has given rise to a desire to reduce the quantity of air used in wall cooling, and has led to the need for improved cooling correlations and validated computational methods. In order to establish a greater understanding of effusion cooling under conditions of very high free-stream turbulence, a new laboratory test facility has been created that is capable of simulating representative combustor flow conditions, and that allows for a systematic investigation of cooling performance over a range of free-stream turbulence conditions (up to 25% intensity, integral length scale-to-coolant hole diameter ratios of 26) and coolant to mainstream density ratios (??_c/??_??? ???2). This thesis describes this new test facility, including the method for generating combustor relevant flow conditions. The hot side film cooling performance of cylindrical and fanned hole effusion has been evaluated in terms of adiabatic film-cooling effectiveness and normalised heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and heat flux reduction (HFR). Infrared thermography was employed to produce spatial resolved surface temperature distributions of the effusion surface. The analysis of this data is supported by fluid temperature field measurements. The interpretation of the data has established the impact of turbulence intensity, integral length scale and density ratio on the mixing processes between free-stream and coolant flows. Elevated levels of free-stream turbulence increase the rate of mixing and degrade the cooling effectiveness at low blowing ratios whereas at high blowing ratios, where the coolant detaches from the surface, a modest increase has been observed under certain conditions; this is due to the turbulent transport of the detached coolant fluid back towards the wall. For angled cylindrical hole injection the impact of density ratio as an independent parameter was found to be relatively weak. Adiabatic effectiveness data gathered at DR's of 1 - 1.4 scaled reasonable well when plotted against momentum flux ratio. This suggests data collected at low DR's can be scaled to engine representative DR's. The investigation of shaped cooling holes found fanned effusion has the potential to dramatically improve film effectiveness. The diffusion of the flow through a fanned exit prevented jet detachment at blowing ratios up to 5, increasing spatially averaged effectiveness by 89%.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:617844
Date January 2013
CreatorsMartin, Damian
PublisherLoughborough University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttps://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/14725

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