Computational Investigation of Effect of Turbulator Arrangements on Turbine Blade Cooling

Turbine inlet temperature is limited by metallurgical considerations and many modern engines make use of air cooled blades to permit operation at elevated temperatures and then it can be assumed that the mass flow remains constant throughout as explained earlier. At higher temperatures it is necessary to extract air from the compressor to cool both stator and rotor blades called as bleed flow of cooling air. The rotor blade cooling is the most difficult problem. It should not be forgotten that, with high gas temperatures, oxidation becomes as significant a limiting factor as creep, and it is therefore equally important to cool unstressed components such as nozzle blades and annulus walls. The objective of the analysis is to study the effect of reduction of temperature and to attain the maximum cooling efficiency on gas turbine blade cooling by varying the geometry of the cooling passages. An attempt is made in this paper to compare the performance of various shapes of blades by using computational fluid dynamics. It was found that blade cooling passage with angled turbulators is more effective in heat transfer while comparing with all other configurations of with and without turbulators.