Evaluation of film cooling superposition method on the suction side of a blade model

Film cooling is often used for turbine airfoil cooling, and there are numerous studies of the performance of a single row of holes. Typically, blades and vanes in gas turbine engines have multiple rows of holes that interact. Consequently, there is a need to develop techniques to predict film cooling performance with multiple rows of holes. One of the method is to superposition single row cooling effectiveness to predict combined effectiveness. Although there have been many studies of superposition techniques with multiple rows of cylindrical holes, there have been very few in which shaped holes were used with a typical turbine airfoil model. In this study, film effectiveness was measured on the suction side of a turbine blade model using two rows of 7-7-7 shaped holes, with pitch to diameter ratio of 6, and the two rows were more than 40 diameters apart. Measurements were made with each row operating independently, which provided the experimental data for superposition predictions. These predictions were evaluated with effectiveness measurements with both rows operational. For these combined row tests, two different upstream blowing ratios and a wide range of downstream blowing ratios were selected. The superposition predictions were reasonably accurate when the upstream blowing ratio was high with a corresponding smaller film effectiveness downstream (due to jet separation). However, when the upstream coolant holes were operated at optimum blowing ratio with maximum film effectiveness downstream, the superposition analysis predicted film effectiveness levels slightly lower than actual levels. These results indicate that there was an interaction between jets that resulted in higher film effectiveness than what the superposition method had predicted.