Heat Transfer for the Film-Cooled Vane of a 1-1/2 Stage High-Pressure Transonic Turbine—Part I: Experimental Configuration and Data Review With Inlet Temperature Profile Effects

This paper investigates the vane airfoil and inner endwall heat transfer for a full-scale turbine stage operating at design corrected conditions under the influence of different vane inlet temperature profiles and vane cooling flow rates. The turbine stage is a modern 3D design consisting of a cooled high-pressure vane, an un-cooled high-pressure rotor, and a low-pressure vane. Inlet temperature profiles (uniform, radial, and hot streaks) are created by a passive heat exchanger and can be made circumferentially uniform to within ±5% of the bulk average inlet temperature when desired. The high-pressure vane has full cooling coverage on both the airfoil surface and the inner and outer endwalls. Two circuits supply coolant to the vane, and a third circuit supplies coolant to the rotor purge cavity. All of the cooling circuits are independently controlled. Measurements are performed using double-sided heat-flux gauges located at four spans of the vane airfoil surface and throughout the inner endwall region. Analysis of the heat transfer measured for the uncooled downstream blade row has been reported previously. Part I of this paper describes the operating conditions and data reduction techniques utilized in this analysis, including a novel application of a traditional statistical method to assign confidence limits to measurements in the absence of repeat runs. The impact of Stanton number definition is discussed while analyzing inlet temperature profile shape effects. Comparison of the present data (Build 2) to the data obtained for an uncooled vane (Build 1) clearly illustrates the impact of the cooling flow and its relative effects on both the endwall and airfoils. Measurements obtained for the cooled hardware without cooling applied agree well with the solid airfoil for the airfoil pressure surface but not for the suction surface. Differences on the suction surface are due to flow being ingested on the pressure surface and reinjected on the suction surface when coolant is not supplied for Build 2. Part II of the paper continues this discussion by describing the influence of overall cooling level variation and the influence of the vane trailing edge cooling on the vane heat transfer measurements.