Fan-Shaped Hole Effects on the Aero-Thermal Performance of a Film-Cooled Endwall

The present paper investigates the effects of a fan-shaped hole endwall cooling geometry on the aero-thermal performance of a nozzle vane cascade. Two endwall cooling geometries with four rows of holes were tested, for different mass flow rate ratios: the first configuration is made of cylindrical holes, whereas the second one features conical expanded exits and a reduced number of holes. The experimental analysis is mainly focused on the variations of secondary flow phenomena related to different injection rates, as they have a strong relationship with the film cooling effectiveness. Secondary flow assessment was performed through downstream 3D aerodynamic measurements, by means of a miniaturized 5-hole probe. The results show that at high injection rates, the passage vortex and the 3D effects tend to become weaker, leading to a strong reduction of the endwall cross flow and to a more uniform flow in spanwise direction. This is of course obtained at the expense of a significant increase of losses. The thermal behavior was then investigated through the analysis of adiabatic effectiveness distributions on the two endwall configurations. The wide-banded thermochromic liquid crystals (TLC) technique was used to determine the adiabatic wall temperature. Using the measured distributions of film-cooling adiabatic effectiveness, the interaction between the secondary flow vortices and the cooling jets can be followed in good detail all over the endwall surface. Fan-shaped holes have been shown to perform better than cylindrical ones: at low injection rates, the cooling performance is increased only in the front part of the vane passage. A larger improvement of cooling coverage all over the endwall is attained with a larger mass flow rate, about 1.5% of core flow, without a substantial increase of the aerodynamic losses.