Nekomimi Film Cooling Holes Configuration Under Conjugate Heat Transfer Conditions

In modern gas turbines, the film cooling technology is essential for the protection of the hot parts, in particular of the first stage vanes and blades of the turbine, against the hot gases from the combustion process in order to reach an acceptable life span of the components. As the cooling air is usually extracted from the compressor, the reduction of the cooling effort would directly result in increased thermal efficiency of the gas turbine. Understanding of the fundamental physics of film cooling is necessary for the improvement of the state-of-the-art. Thus, huge research efforts by industry as well as research organizations have been undertaken to establish high efficient film cooling technologies. Today it is common knowledge that film cooling effectiveness degradation is caused by secondary flows inside the cooling jets, i.e. the Counter-Rotating Vortices (CRV) or sometimes also called kidney-vortices, which induce a lift-off of the jet. Further understanding of the secondary flow development inside the jet and how this could be influenced, has led to hole configurations, which can induce Anti-Counter-Rotating Vortices (ACRV) in the cooling jets. As a result, the cooling air remains close to the wall and is additionally distributed flatly along the surface. Beside different other technologies, the NEKOMIMI cooling technology is a promising approach to establish the desired ACRVs. It consists of a combination of two holes in just one configuration so that the air is distributed mainly on two cooling air streaks following the special shape of the generated geometry.The NEKOMIMI configuration and two conventional cooling hole configurations (cylindrical and shaped holes) has been investigated numerically under adiabatic and conjugate heat transfer conditions. The influence of the conjugate heat transfer on the secondary flow structure has been analysed.In conjugate heat transfer calculations, it cannot directly derived from the surface temperature distribution if the reached cooling effectiveness values are due to the improved hole configuration with improved secondary flow structure or due to the heat conduction in the material. Therefore, a methodology has been developed, to distinguish between cooling effectiveness due to heat conduction in the material and film cooling flow over the surface. The numerical results shows that for the NEKOMIMI configuration, 77% of the reached overall cooling effectiveness is due to film cooling with improved flow structure in the secondary flow (ACRV) and 23% due to heat conduction in the material. For the cylindrical hole configuration, 10% of the reached overall cooling effectiveness is due to the film cooling flow structure and 90% due to heat conduction in the material.Copyright © 2014 by ASME