Numerische Untersuchung einer innovativen Kühlbohrungstechnologie in Gasturbinen

In modern gas turbines, the film cooling technology is essential for the protection of the hot parts, in particular of the first stage vanes and blades of the turbine, against the hot gases from the combustion process in order to reach an acceptable life span of the components. As the cooling air is usually extracted from the compressor, the reduction of the cooling effort would directly result in increased thermal efficiency of the gas turbine. Understanding of the fundamental physics of film cooling is necessary for the improvement of the state-of-the-art. Thus, huge research efforts by industry as well as research organizations have been undertaken to establish high efficient film cooling technologies. Today it is common knowledge that film cooling effectiveness degradation is caused by secondary flows inside the cooling jets, i.e. the Counter-Rotating Vortices (CRV) or sometimes also called kidney-vortices, which induce a lift-off of the jet. Further understanding of the secondary flow development inside the jet and how this could be influenced, has led to hole configurations, which can induce Anti-Counter-Rotating Vortices (ACRV) in the cooling jets. As a result, the cooling air remains close to the wall and is additionally distributed flatly along the surface. Beside different other technologies, the NEKOMIMI cooling technology is a promising approach to establish the desired ACRVs. It consists of a combination of two holes in just one configuration so that the air is distributed mainly on two cooling air streaks following the special shape of the generated geometry. The NEKOMIMI cooling holes outperformes the conventional cylinder an shaped holes regarding the overall film cooling effectiveness by more than 40%.