Gas turbine blade tip heat transfer and cooling: A literature survey

Gas turbines are widely used for aircraft propulsion, land-base power generation, and other industrial applications like trains, marines, automobiles, etc. To satisfy the fast development of advanced gas turbines, the operating temperature must be increased to improve the thermal efficiency and output work of the gas turbine engine. However, the heat transferred to the turbine blade is substantially increased as the turbine inlet temperature is continuously increased. Thus, it is very important to cool the turbine blades for a long durability and safe operation. Cooling the blade must include cooling of the key regions being exposed to the hot gas. The blade tip region is such a critical area and is indeed difficult to cool. This results from the tip clearance gap where the complex tip leakage flow occurs and thereby local high heat loads prevail. This paper presents a literature survey of blade tip leakage flow and heat transfer, as well as research of external and internal cooling technologies. The present paper does not intend to review all published results in this field, nor review all papers from the past to now. This paper is limited to a review of recently available published works by several researchers, especially from 2001 to present, concerning blade tip leakage flow associated with heat transfer, and external or/and internal tip cooling technologies.