Local end-wall heat transfer enhancement by jet impingement on a short pin-fin

A short pin-fin array has been used to improve the internal cooling characteristics at the trailing edge of some gas turbine blade designs. In such a cooling scheme, the pin-fin array that is sandwiched by the turbine blade's inner surfaces, experiences a uniform-like coolant stream. The local elevation of internal heat transfer especially on the end-walls (i.e., inner blade surfaces) at the trailing edge is achieved predominantly by horseshoe vortex-type secondary flows whose fluidic behavior has been well established. A modification to this cooling scheme has been made by introducing a blockage upstream, causing multiple jets to impinge on the pin-fins - the blockage jets. Previous studies on the internal cooling scheme employing the blockage jets have assumed that the end-wall flow topology is similar to that formed by the horseshoe vortex-type secondary flows due to similar local heat transfer distributions. However, there is no detailed and sufficient acknowledgement made of the lack of an approaching boundary layer. Therefore, the present study experimentally investigates local heat transfer around a single short pin-fin subjected to a fully turbulent jet impingement simulating the blockage jet impingement and demonstrates that the end-wall flow topology loosely resembles that formed by a horseshoe vortex system and is strictly different, depending on the distance between the jet exit and the pin-fin, relative to the length of the jet's potential core.