Experimental and Numerical Investigation of a Multi-Jet Impingement Cooling Configuration

Abstract

In order to protect turbine blades from thermal damage or thermally induced aging, internal impingement cooling has found common use throughout engine design, both in stationary gas turbines as well as aircraft engines, but also finds applications in other areas requiring cooling. The present investigation is focused on a generic impingement cooling configuration that can be easily modelled with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and at the same time can be studied in detail experimentally. The acquired experimental data can be directly used for the validation of the CFD simulations, ultimately allowing their application in more complex, realistic configurations where experimental investigations become prohibitively expensive or otherwise impossible. The investigated configuration consists of 9 evenly spaced jets of Reynolds number Re D = 10000 issuing into a square channel that is sealed at one end. The jets directly impinge on a uniformly heated target plate. With previous work on similar configurations well described in literature, the focus of the present contribution is to further exploit the potentials offered by snap-shot based and time-resolved measurements. The flow field within the channel is characterized with both conventional, snap-shot particle image velocimetry (PIV) as well as with high-speed, time-resolved PIV (TR-PIV) to, respectively, capture overview data as well as detailed information on temporally evolving flow structures. In addition, measurements of the unsteady surface temperature distribution on the heated channel wall are performed by means of a newly developed unsteady temperature sensitive paint (iTSP) measurement technique. The interaction of the turbulent jets with the wall and with its neighbors is studied in detail using correlation and spectral analysis as well as modal decomposition. Where possible, this is supplemented with corresponding data obtained from numerical modelling. None of the applied postprocessing methods reveal a significant interaction between jets suggesting that the jet-driven dynamics of heat transfer at the wall are restricted to their immediate vicinity which may simplify the requirements on numerical models of similar cooling configurations.