Heat Transfer in a Rotating Cavity With a Stationary Stepped Casing

In the system considered here, corotating “turbine” disks are cooled by air supplied at the periphery of the system. The system comprises two corotating disks, connected by a rotating cylindrical hub and shrouded by a stepped, stationary cylindrical outer casing. Cooling air enters the system through holes in the periphery of one disk, and leaves through the clearances between the outer casing and the disks. The paper describes a combined computational and experimental study of the heat transfer in the above-described system. In the experiments, one rotating disk is heated, the hub and outer casing are insulated, and the other disk is quasi-adiabatic. Thermocouples and fluxmeters attached to the heated disc enable the Nusselt numbers, Nu, to be determined for a wide range of rotational speeds and coolant flow rates. Computations are carried out using an axisymmetric elliptic solver incorporating the Launder–Sharma low-Reynolds-number k–ε turbulence model. The flow structure is shown to be complex and depends strongly on the so-called turbulent flow parameter, λ_T, which incorporates both rotational speed and flow rate. For a given value λ_T, the computations show that Nu increases as Re_φ, the rotational Reynolds number, increases. Despite the complexity of the flow, the agreement between the computed and measured Nusselt numbers is reasonably good.