Investigation of The Use of Some Metallic Oxides Nanoparticles on The Internal Cooling Performance of Air in a Gas Turbine Stator Blade

The need to operate gas turbines at high temperatures for better performance places a high demand on their material selection and limits them to only a few. The required operating high temperatures also make efficient cooling imperative to prevent thermal failures. The cooling of gas turbine blades is achieved through a combination of methods, including internal cooling, film cooling, and coated cooling. Air is the commonly adopted cooling medium in internal cooling. This study, therefore, seeks to determine the impact of adding metallic oxide nanoparticles to it. The effect of using Aluminium oxide, Copper oxide, Silicon oxide and Zinc oxide nanoparticles as dispersants in the cooling fluid was investigated on the Alpha-beta titanium alloy (Ti-6Al-4V) turbine stator blade. The size of the nanoparticles studied was 20 nm, and the volume fraction was 0.04. The effective nanofluid parameters were determined using appropriate relations, and the performance of the respective nanofluids as a cooling fluid was modelled using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.5 Software. The nanofluids resulted in an enhanced heat transfer away from the stator blade and also led to an improvement in total blade displacement. However, this came at the high cost of increased developed stress and is a recipe for failure.