Impact of Blowing and Density Ratio on the Film Cooling and Heat Transfer in an Aggressive Turbine Center Frame

Abstract It was shown in the previous study that the aft purge flows from the last stage of the high-pressure turbine (HPT) have a significant film cooling potential in the downstream turbine center frame (TCF) (Jagerhofer et al., 2023, “Heat Transfer and Film Cooling in an Aggressive Turbine Center Frame,” ASME J. Turbomach., 145(12), p. 121012). The TCF is a stationary duct that guides the flow from the HPT outlet to the low-pressure turbine (LPT) inlet and is the third most thermally loaded engine component. This article investigates the impact of different purge-to-mainstream blowing and density ratios on the film cooling effectiveness and the heat transfer coefficient in the TCF. The experiments were conducted in a product-representative 1.5-stage HPT-TCF-LPT vane configuration under Mach-similarity in the Transonic Test Turbine Facility (TTTF) at TU Graz. The blowing ratio has been demonstrated to be the dominant parameter for purge film cooling in TCFs since HPT purge flows typically have very low momentum. Even at twice the nominal blowing ratio, no cooling film detachment was observed on the TCF hub or shroud surface. Varying the density ratio in the experimentally possible range delivered no significant differences in the results. With increasing purge blowing ratios, the film cooling effectiveness in the TCF increases as expected, but the heat transfer also intensifies due to the purge injection. The circumferentially averaged film cooling on the hub scales relatively well with an offset version of the well-known Hartnett correlation (Hartnett et al., 1961, “Velocity Distributions, Temperature Distributions, Effectiveness and Heat Transfer for Air Injected Through a Tangential Slot Into a Turbulent Boundary Layer,” ASME J. Heat Transfer, 83(3), pp. 293–305) that takes into account the ingress-induced premixing of the purge flow in the cavities.