Internal cooling structures for gas turbine engines are becoming more complicated to push the hot gas temperature as high as possible, which, however, allows particulates drawn into the coolant air to be more readily to deposit within these passages and thus greatly affect their flow loss and thermal performance. In this study, internal swirl cooling and jet impingement cooling subjected to particulate deposition were evaluated and compared using a conjugate heat transfer method, with an emphasis on the thermal effects of the insulative deposits. To accomplish the goal, an unsteady conjugate mesh morphing simulation framework was developed and validated, which involved particle tracking in an unsteady fluid flow, particle–wall interaction modeling, conjugate mesh morphing of both fluid and solid domains, and a deposit identification method. The swirl and the jet impingement cooling configurations modeled the internal cooling passage for the leading-edge region of a turbine blade and were investigated in a dust-laden coolant environment at real engine conditions. Coupling effects between the dynamic deposition process and the unsteady flow inside the two cooling channels were examined and the insulative effects of the deposits were quantified by comparing the temperatures on the external and internal surfaces of the metal channel walls, as well as on the deposit layers. Results demonstrated the ability of the newly developed, unsteady conjugate simulation framework to identify the deposits from the original bare wall surface and to predict the insulation effects of the deposits in the dynamic deposition process. The dust almost covered the entire impingement channel, while deposits were only seen in the vicinity of the jets in the swirl channel. Despite this, a dramatical decrease of convection heat transfer was found in the swirl channel because the swirling flow was sensitive to the interruption of the deposits. In contrast, the deposits improved the heat transfer rate in the impingement channel. When the thermal effects of the deposit layer were taken into account, the wall temperatures of both two cooling geometries were substantially elevated, exceeding the allowable temperature of the metal material. Due to the denser deposit coverage, the impingement channel wall had a greater temperature increase than the swirl channel. In terms of flow loss, the presence of the deposits inhibited the swirl intensity by interrupting the swirling flow and thus reduced the friction loss, whereas the pressure loss was improved by the deposits in the impingement cooling.

In this paper, detailed overall cooling effectiveness and associated flow patterns are presented for two distinct film hole distribution patterns over a turbine endwall: an axial-row pattern and an iso-Mach number line row pattern. Measurements, in combination with numerical simulations, are performed in a scaled-up cascade. Thermal protection for the endwall is achieved by jet-array impingement on the cold side and discrete film cooling on the hot-gas side, combined with purge air from an inclined slot that simulates the upstream seal cavity. Infrared (IR) thermography techniques are used to obtain overall effectiveness in a wide range of coolant flow ratios of 1.5–3.8%. Mach numbers at the exit of the vane cascade are 0.25 and 0.70, representing the variations of engine operating conditions. Overall effectiveness measurements and computational flowfields show that the iso-Mach number line hole pattern outperforms the hole pattern with axial rows of holes in terms of overall effectiveness levels and thermodynamic energy losses, regardless of coolant flow ratios. Increasing Mach number increases overall effectiveness levels on the endwall and higher Mach numbers generate higher effectiveness improvement for the iso-Mach number line arrangement, relative to the axial-row configuration. Additionally, adding purge air to the endwall considerably improves the overall effectiveness levels and purge air performs better for the axial-row pattern due to no direct interactions with downstream discrete coolant injection.

In this paper, detailed flow patterns and heat transfer characteristics of a jet impingement system with extended jet holes are experimentally and numerically studied. The jet holes in the jet plate present an inline array of 16 × 5 rows in the streamwise (i.e., the crossflow direction) and spanwise directions, where the streamwise and spanwise distances between adjacent holes, which are normalized by the jet hole diameter (x_n/d and y_n/d), are 8 and 5, respectively. The jets impinge onto a smooth target plate with a normalized distance (z_n/d) of 3.5 apart from the jet plate. The jet holes are extended by inserting stainless tubes throughout the jet holes and the extended lengths are varied in a range of 1.0d–2.5d, depending on the jet position in the streamwise direction. The experimental data is obtained by using the transient thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) technique for wide operating jet Reynolds numbers of (1.0 × 10⁴)–(3.0 × 10⁴). The numerical simulations are well-validated using the experimental data and provide further insight into the flow physics within the jet impingement system. Comparisons with a traditional baseline jet impingement scheme show that the extended jet holes generate much higher local heat transfer levels and provide more uniform heat transfer distributions over the target plate, resulting in the highest improvement of approximately 36% in the Nusselt number. Although the extended jet hole configuration requires a higher pumping power to drive the flow through the impingement system, the gain of heat transfer prevails over the penalty of flow losses. At the same pumping power consumption, the extended jet hole design also has more than 10% higher heat transfer than the baseline scheme.