Advanced Component Cooling Design and Evaluation for Gas Turbine Engines

ABSTRACT:Significant gains to engine performance are achievable through the development of advanced cooling designs in blade and vane airfoils in order to allow higher turbine inlet temperatures. Correspondingly, reductions in maintenance costs can be achieved through higher confidence evaluation criteria for such cooling designs. In this effort, scaling parameters used between experimental and engine conditions are redefined and a new heat transfer and durability metric is developed to qualify advanced cooling configurations. The results will provide a higher confidence for designers to increase turbine inlet temperature and for operators to relax excessive maintenance intervals. Furthermore, the metric will be applied to qualify the integration of a highly promising cooling design into an airfoil in place of (and compared against) a baseline configuration. To achieve the topic goals, combined computational and experimental analyses will be completed, utilizing the wealth of information available in CFD with the trusted basis of experimentation. Existing experimental data on a baseline turbine configuration augmented with focused testing will be used to validate the computational methods in Phase I. Computational analyses and model developments will be completed primarily at the proposers Indianapolis office with Phase I and II testing completed at Zucrow Labs of Purdue University.BENEFIT:A key benefit of the completed effort will be to bring fidelity forward in the design process to reduce the time and complexity associated with determining the performance of various airfoil cooling concepts. This will benefit both the military and commercial aircraft engine communities. It will also benefit other applications where overcoming difficult heat transfer problems is critical to improving performance, reliability and cost. Examples include heat exchangers in select applications; fast and slow cook off detection and remediation system for ballistic missiles and anti-missile defense systems; ground-based gas turbines and steam turbines; and high temperature reactors.