Modelling of Film Cooling for Turbine Blade Design

Abstract

The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics for modern turbine blade design requires the accurate representation of the effect of film cooling. However, including the cooling holes in the computational domain requires a substantial meshing effort and leads to a drastic increase in the computing time. Therefore, it is here proposed to represent the effect of cooling holes by adding a local source term at the hole exit. The major advantage of such a method is that it does not require any additional meshing effort and induces only a small increase in computational time. Results obtained with this approach are compared to experimental data and to results obtained with the full meshing of the cooling holes on a series of test cases. Though details of the flow structure downstream of the holes cannot be perfectly captured, this method allows an accurate prediction of the overall flow and performance modifications induced by the presence of the cooling holes.