A 3D Conjugate Approach for Analysing a Double-Walled Effusion-Cooled Turbine Blade

A double-wall cooling scheme combined with effusion cooling offers a practical approximation to transpiration cooling which in turn presents the potential for very high cooling effectiveness. The use of the conventional conjugate CFD for the double-wall blade can be computationally expensive and this approach is therefore less than ideal in cases where only the preliminary results are required. This paper presents a computationally efficient numerical approach for analysing a double-wall effusion cooled gas turbine blade. An existing correlation from the literature was modified and used to represent the two-dimensional distribution of film cooling effectiveness. The internal heat transfer coefficient was calculated from a validated conjugate analysis of a wall element representing an element of the aerofoil wall and the conduction through the blade solved using a finite element code in ANSYS*. The numerical procedure developed has permitted a rapid evaluation of the critical parameters including; film cooling effectiveness, blade temperature distribution (and hence metal effectiveness) as well as coolant mass flow consumption. Good agreement was found between the results from this study and that from literature. This paper shows that a straightforward numerical approach that combines an existing correlation for film cooling from the literature with a conjugate analysis of a small wall element can be used to quickly predict the blade temperature distribution and other crucial blade performance parameters.