Turbine Vane Endwall Film Cooling From Cross-Row Configuration With Simulated Upstream Leakage Flow

The performance of a full coverage film cooling configuration called cross-row (CR) configuration including upstream inlet leakage flow was studied by measuring the adiabatic film cooling effectiveness distribution using PSP technique. Experiments were conducted in a blow-down wind tunnel cascade facility at the isentropic exit Mach number of 0.5 corresponding to inlet Reynolds number of 3.8 × 10⁵, based on axial chord length. A free-stream turbulence level was generated as high as 19% with a length scale of 1.7 cm at the inlet. The results are presented as two-dimensional adiabatic film cooling effectiveness distributions on the endwall surface with corresponding spanwise averaged distributions. The focus of this study is to investigate the effect of coolant-to-mainstream mass flow ratio (MFR) and density ratio (DR) on the proposed endwall cooling design. Initially, increased MFR for the endwall cooling and upstream leakage levels up the local adiabatic cooling effectiveness and yields relatively uniform coverage on the entire endwall. However, in either case, highest MFR does not provide any improvement as endwall cooling suffered from the jet lift-off and leakage coolant coverage restricted by the downstream near-wall flow field. Results also indicated a density ratio of 1.5 provides the best performance. Finally, a fair comparison is made with another design called axial-row (AR) configuration from a companion paper.