Numerical investigation on heat transfer in an advanced new leading edge impingement cooling configuration

It is known that the leading edge has the most critical heat transfer area of a gas turbine blade. The highest heat transfer rates on the airfoil can always be found on the stagnation region of the leading edge. In order to further improve the gas turbine thermal efficiency the development of more advanced internal cooling configurations at leading edge is very necessary. As the state of the art leading edge cooling configuration a concave channel with multi inline jets has been widely used in most of the blades. However, this kind of configuration also generates strong spent flow, which shifts the impingement off the stagnation point and weakens the impingement heat transfer. In order to solve this problem a new internal cooling configuration using double swirl chambers in gas turbine leading edge has been developed and introduced in this paper. The double swirl chambers cooling (DSC) technology is introduced by the authors and contributes a significant enhancement of heat transfer due to the generation of two anti-rotated swirls. In DSC-cooling, the reattachment of the swirl flows always occurs in the middle of the chamber, which results in a linear impingement effect. Compared with the reference standard impingement cooling configuration this new cooling system provides a much more uniform heat transfer distribution in the chamber axial direction and also provides a much higher heat transfer rate. In this study, the influences of different geometrical parameters e.g. merging ratio of two cylinder channels, the jet inlet hole configurations and radius of blunt protuberances in DSC have been investigated numerically. The results show that in the DSC cooling system the jet inlet hole configurations have large influences on the thermal performance. The rectangular inlet holes, especially those with higher aspect ratios, show much better heat transfer enhancement than the round inlet holes. However, as the price for it the total pressure drop is increased. Using blunt protuberances instead of sharp edges in the DSC cooling can improve the heat transfer enhancement and reduce the total pressure drop.