Book Description

Cooling of the high-pressure turbine in a gas turbine engine is essential for durability because the gas temperature entering the turbine exceeds the melting point of the hardware. Both internal and external cooling reduces the temperature of the blades and vanes. Using air that bypassed the combustor as coolant, the convective heat transfer from the hardware to this internal coolant is often augmented by ribs or a serpentine path. To cool the external surface, coolant passes through holes on the outer wall of airfoil. The coolant creates a protective film on the surface. The shape of the cooling hole influences the cooling effectiveness of this film cooling. Additive manufacturing facilitates rapid prototyping compared to traditional manufacturing methods, which can be exploited for designing and evaluating cooling schemes of gas turbine hardware. The work in this dissertation used additive manufacturing to investigate the cooling performance of several internal and external cooling schemes manufactured in at engine scale for the unique objective of determining the impacts of the internal cooling scheme on the external cooling. A variety of cooling hole shapes were investigated for this work: cylindrical hoes, meter-diffuser shaped holes, and novel optimized holes. Once additively manufactured, the as-built cooling hole surfaces were analyzed to determined their roughness and minimum cross-sectional areas. The arithmetic mean roughness of holes built at the optimal build orientation (perpendicular to the build plate) were on the order of 10 [mu]m; whereas those investigated at other build orientations had roughness values up to 75 [mu]m. For the holes built perpendicular to the substrate the minimum cross-sectional area was usually greater than the design intent but within 15%. The additive process also created an overbuilt lip on the leading edge (windward) side of the hole exit for these holes because of the thin wall thickness in the design. Using these cooling holes, the impact of rounding on meter-diffuser shaped holes and optimized holes on overall effectiveness was investigated. The rounding, which came in the form of inlet fillets on the meter-diffuser shaped holes, was found to decrease the required pressure ratio to obtain the same cooling effectiveness. The deviations from the design due to the additive process caused the novel cooling hole shapes designed through adjoint optimization to perform differently than anticipated. For example, the coolant jet from hole designed for co-flow did not bifurcate as the computational simulation showed. The cross-flow optimized hole outperformed the co-flow optimized hole for most of the tested blowing ratio when both holes were tested in a co-flow configuration. These results from the novel optimized holes proved the necessity of experimentally verifying new designs prior to incorporating into final cooling schemes. The effect of supply channel height, number of channels, ribs, and the cross-sectional shape of the supply channel was investigated to determine the impact of each on the overall effectiveness. Designs that had high overall effectiveness from only internal cooling had less augmentation in effectiveness from film cooling than designs with less effective internal cooling. For example, a ribbed channel typically had a lower film-cooling augmentation than the film-cooling augmentation for same supply channel without ribs. However, a highly effective feed channel can obtain a higher overall effectiveness without any film cooling than a poorly performing feed channel can obtain with film cooling. But the features that create a highly effective feed channel can also cause the cooling jet to lift-off the surface and mix with the hot gas path, which was seen with some rib and hole combinations and with the triangle -- vertex down supply channels. Therefore, the hole shape, the supply channel geometry, and the junction between the two all significantly contribute to a cooling scheme's performance and all three must be considered concurrently to create an optimal cooling design.