Research on heavy-duty gas turbine vane high efficiency cooling performance considering coolant phase transfer

Conjugate simulation for heavy-duty gas turbine vane of mist/air phase transfer cooling is carried out to evaluate the cooling enhancement. The Eulerian–Lagrangian particle tracking method is adopted to investigate the two-phase cooling for a gas turbine vane. The accuracy of numerical simulation program for conjugate heat transfer methodology is verified with the C3X gas turbine vane cooled with leading film holes. The effect of various parameters including mist concentration and mist diameter on the cooling performance improvement is investigated in this paper. Results show that the average blade surface temperature reduction about 90 K, 119 K and 94 K are achieved at hub section, midspan section and tip section with 8% mist injection. This translates into a significant blade surface cooling effectiveness enhancement of 11%, 15% and 11%, respectively. The disparate trends are shown for the influence of mist diameter on the blade cooling performance at different spanwise and chordwise location, the results indicate that the degree and the location of cooling performance can be controlled by manipulating different sizes of injected water mist.