Investigations on the influence of rib orientation angle on film cooling performance of cylindrical holes

This paper presents an experimental and numerical investigation on the film cooling with different coolant feeding channel structures. Two ribbed cross-flow channels with riborientation of 135° and 45° respectively and the plenum coolant channel have been studied and compared to find out the effect of rib orientation on the film cooling performances of cylindrical holes. The film cooling effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient were measured by the transient heat transfer measurement technique with narrow-band thermochromic liquid crystal. Numerical simulations with realizable k-ϵ turbulence model were also performed to analyze the flow mechanism. The results show that the coolant channel structure has a notable effect on the flow structure of film jet which is the most significant mechanism affecting the film cooling performance. Generally, film cooling cases fed with ribbed cross-flow channels have asymmetric counter-rotating vortex structures and related asymmetric temperature distributions, which make the film cooling effectiveness and the heat transfer coefficient distributions asymmetric to the hole centerline. The discharge coefficient of the 45° rib case is the lowest among the three cases under all the blowing ratios. And the plenum case has higher discharge coefficient than the 135° rib case under low blowing ratio. With the increase of blowing ratio, the discharge coefficient of the 135° rib case gets larger than the plenum case gradually, because the vortex in the upper half region of the coolant channel rotates in the same direction with the film hole inclination direction and makes the jet easy to flow into the film hole in the 135° rib case.