Experimental Study of Effusion Cooling With Pressure-Sensitive Paint

Gas turbines overall efficiency enhancement requires further increasing of the firing temperature and decreasing of cooling flow usage. Multihole (or effusion, or full-coverage) film cooling is widely used for hot gas path components cooling in modern gas turbines. The present study focused on the adiabatic film effectiveness measurement of a round multihole flat-plate coupon. The measurements were conducted in a subsonic open-loop wind tunnel with a generic setup to cover different running conditions. The test conditions were characterized by a constant main flow Mach number of 0.1 with constant gas temperature. Adiabatic film effectiveness was measured by pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) through mass transfer analogy. CO₂ was used as the coolant to reach the density ratio of 1.5. Rig computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was conducted to evaluate the impact of inlet boundary layer on testing. Experimental data cover blowing ratios (BRs) at 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, and 2.0. Both 2D maps and lateral average profiles clearly indicated that the film effectiveness increases with increasing BR for BR < 0.8 and decreases with increasing BR for BR > 0.8. This observation agreed with coolant jet behavior of single film row, i.e., attached, detached then reattached, and fully detached. PSP data quality was then discussed in detail for validating large eddy simulation.