Investigation of turbine blade trailing edge cooling and thermal mixing characteristics

The present computation investigates a turbine blade with trailing-edge cutback coolant ejection designs, aiming for a comparison study of aerothermal performances such as discharge coefficient and film cooling effectiveness due to the change of trailing-edge geometries and blowing ratios. The shear-stress transport (SST) k-w turbulence model is adopted and numerical studies are carried out by two-stage investigations:- firstly, validation of an existing cutback blade model with staggered circular pin-fins array inside the cooling passage that has been extensively studied by other researchers and predicted internal passage discharge coefficient and film-cooling effectiveness along the cutback surface are compared to experimental measurements. RANS/URANS and DES are applied during this stage; secondly, further investigation of four main cases considering different key design parameters such as the ratio of lip thickness to slot height (t/H = 0.25, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5), the design of internal features (i.e. circular pin-fin array, elliptic pin-fin array, and empty duct), the coolant ejection angle (alpha = 5 degrees, 10 degrees and 15 degrees). In addition, a trailing-edge cutback model with suction-side (SS) ÔöÇ pressure-side (PS) walls and lands is considered to create a more realistic blade design. The results show that both steady and unsteady RANS predictions are able to produce discharge coefficients in fairly good agreement with test data, but not the film-cooling effectiveness on cutback surfaces which over-predicts in far-field wake region. Further prediction improvements can be made by using unsteady DES approach. In terms of film-cooling effectiveness and shedding frequency, computational results indicate a strong dependency on those aforementioned key design parameters. This film-cooling effectiveness is strongly affected by turbulent flow structures along the cutback region, which is representing the dynamic mixing process between the mainstream flow and the ejecting coolant from the slot-exit. The use of elliptic pin-fin inside the cooling passage and thin lip thickness could improve the effectiveness of film-cooling. The increase of ejection angle yields almost near unity cooling effectiveness along the protected wall. Significant improvements on cooling performance are also achieved with higher blowing ratios. Computations of the trailing-edge cutback cooling with pressure-side (PS) and suction-side (SS) wall demonstrates that performance of the case without lands is better than that of the case with lands by discrepancy up to 18% in terms of overall-averaged film-cooling effectiveness. The blade trailing-edge design with lands causes a rapid decay of the averaged film-cooling effectiveness near t