Predictions of enhanced heat transfer of an internal blade tip-wall with hemispherical dimples or protrusions

The blade tip region encounters high thermal loads because of the hot gas leakage flows, and it must therefore be cooled to ensure a long durability and safe operation. A common way to cool a blade tip is to design serpentine passages with 180 deg turns under the blade tip-cap inside the turbine blade. Improved internal convective cooling is therefore required to increase the blade tip lifetime. Dimples and protrusions are well recognized as effective devices to augment heat transfer in various applications. In this paper, enhanced heat transfer of an internal blade tip-wall has been predicted numerically. The computational models consist of a two-pass channel with a 180 deg turn and arrays of hemispherical dimples or protrusions internally mounted on the tip-wall. Inlet Reynolds numbers are in the range of 100,000-600,000. The computations are three dimensional, steady, incompressible, and nonrotating. The overall performance of the two-pass channels is also evaluated. It is found that due to the combination of turning impingement and protrusion crossflow or dimple advection, the heat transfer coefficient of the augmented tip is a factor of 2.0 higher than that of a smooth tip. This augmentation is achieved at the cost of a penalty of pressure drop by around 5%. By comparing the present dimples' or protrusions' performance with others in previous works, it is found that the augmented tips show the best performance, and the dimpled or protruded tips are superior to those pin-finned tips when the active area enhancement is excluded. It is suggested that dimples and protrusions can be used to enhance blade tip heat transfer and hence improve blade tip cooling.