Sensitivity of Adiabatic Cooling Effectiveness to Mainstream and Coolant Temperatures in Transonic Flow Over an Idealized Blade Tip Model

Abstract Film cooling, as a key technology to ensure turbine survival in new generation gas turbines, has been studied profusely in subsonic flows. But in transonic flow, the determination of adiabatic cooling effectiveness faces a dilemma in the state of the art. Specifically, derivation of reference temperature, or local recovery temperature, in adiabatic effectiveness is disputable. Some researchers designate it to be the adiabatic wall temperature for the uncooled model (linear regression method, LRM), but others calculate it from an iterative procedure based on a pair of cooling tests (dual linear regression method, DLRM). As the first of the kind effort to explore this dilemma, this paper carried out transient thermal measurements by infrared thermography, for transonic flow over an idealized blade tip model. Heat transfer experiments were conducted for the uncooled and cooled cases, at two mainstream temperatures of 340K and 325K, and two coolant temperatures of 276K and 287K. Data from these six experimental groups were processed by LRM and DLRM respectively, to obtain heat transfer coefficient and adiabatic effectiveness, whose sensitivity to mainstream and coolant temperatures is tested and compared. It is found that heat transfer coefficient is basically insensitive to temperature boundary conditions and data reduction methods, as expected. However, for adiabatic effectiveness, LRM results are sensitive to the 11K decrease of coolant temperature in areas confined to the upstream of cooling injection, and much less so to the 15K rise in mainstream temperature. DLRM result, derived from the test pair with two coolant temperatures, reduces globally and conspicuously with 15K increase in mainstream temperature. Furthermore, adiabatic effectiveness obtained by LRM is qualitatively different to that by DLRM, which is mainly attributed to the large discrepancy of reference temperature between the two methods.