Thermohydraulic Performance Analysis in Square Duct Featuring Novel High-Performance Broken Ribs and Ribs With Fins for High Reynolds Number Gas Turbine Blade Internal Cooling

This study investigates the thermal-hydraulic performance of novel rib configurations, specifically novel V-shaped broken ribs, and V-shaped ribs with fins, within a square channel for significantly high Reynolds number conditions. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are solved utilizing the ANSYS Fluent 2022 R2 solver with the realizable version of the k-ε RNG turbulence model. Computational simulations cover a Reynolds number range from 100,000 to 500,000 while maintaining various dimensions for ribs and fins relative to the channel hydraulic diameter (Dh). The conventional V-shaped rib configuration data from the previous experiment has been used to validate the numerical model for this study. The V-shaped ribs with fins exhibit higher heat transfer enhancement surpassing V-shaped broken ribs by 13% at Reynolds of 300,000. More importantly novel V-shaped ribs with fins and V-shaped broken ribs geometry do not show significant heat transfer degradation when the Reynolds number increases from 100,000 to 500,000. This study offers valuable insights for optimizing rib geometry concurrently to enhance hydraulic and thermal performance for extremely high Reynolds number conditions (> 90,000).