Experimental investigation of effusion and transpiration air cooling for single turbine blade

Abstract A great number of studies have been conducted on a film cooling for turbine blades, which is to prevent thermal damage on blades originated from high turbine inlet temperature. However, film cooling with several rows of cooling-holes results in lifting-off of coolant film and limited cooling on a restricted area due to flow reattachment. In this study, effusion and transpiration cooling were applied to the single C3X blade. A multiple hole-array with a diameter of 0.5 mm was fabricated by the electric discharging machining, and a porous structure with an equivalent pore diameter of 40 μm was manufactured by the 3-D metal additive manufacturing. Experiments were performed in the high-temperature subsonic wind tunnel, which has a freestream temperature of 100℃ and a velocity of 20 m/s. The surface temperature of blades was measured using infrared thermometry with a specially designed protocol to eliminate background radiation errors from the surroundings. Also, the outflow of coolant from blades was investigated with smoke-laser sheet visualization. The overall cooling effectiveness was quantitatively analyzed on the pressure-side, suction-side, and leading-edge of blades. Due to the enhancement of convective cooling through porous media, transpiration cooling achieves 34% and 25% higher cooling effectiveness than effusion and internal cooling each.