Katty Vane

This paper reports a numerical investigation on the prediction of the thermal and hydrodynamic flow fields of multi micro jet impingement cooling of three dimensional turbine vanes. A three dimensional vane is modeled with an in-line array of impinging jets of diameters 0.5 and 0.25 mm. The numerical model consists of the steady, Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes equations and the Kω SST Turbulence model. The governing equations are solved using a finite volume method. The crossflow mass velocity (G c ) to jet mass velocity (G j ) ratio, and the average and local heat transfer distributions are analyzed with varying mass velocity and jet-to-target spacing. It is found out that a significant decrease in crossflow ratio occurs with the smaller diameters. Due to the lower crossflow and higher exit velocities of the smaller jets, the penetration into the crossflow is much higher. Moreover, at a constant mass flow, the use of micro-jets enhanced the overall average heat transfer coefficient by 63%, while at a fixed pressure drop across the vane instead of the mass flow, the smaller diameters will still yield an enhancement of 34.3% in the overall average heat transfer coefficient.