Sankaranarayanan Vengadesan

Internal cooling of the gas turbine blade is critical for the durability of the blade material. One of the ways to accomplish this is by passing coolant through serpentine passages roughened with surface elements to enhance the heat transfer. In the present study, the traditional square rib (SQ-rib) placed normal to the flow direction is modified to a backward-facing step rib (BS-rib) and a forward-facing step rib (FS-rib). Large-eddy simulation (LES) is carried out for a square duct at Reb = 20000. Results show that the modified rib shapes result in substantial increase in heat transfer over the square rib with only a marginal increase in flow losses. The BS-rib shape produces the highest heat transfer augmentation followed by the FS-rib. The overall heat transfer augmentation for the BS-rib and FS-rib is 18% and 10% larger than the SQ-rib, respectively. Thermal-hydraulic performance is enhanced by 15%.

Cooling of turbine blades is necessary for longer durability and better thermal efficiency of the turbines. Turbine blade cooling is fulfilled by passing a coolant through the serpentine channel roughened with turbulators. In this work, the combined effect of the centrifugal buoyancy and the Coriolis force on heat transfer of a square duct roughened with ribs is studied using Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Simulations are carried for a Reynolds number based on bulk velocity of 20,000 with staggered square (SQ) rib, Backward step (BS) rib, and Forward step (FS) rib on the leading and trailing wall. The heat transfer performance of the square duct roughened with ribs is compared at rotation numbers Ro=0.35,0.67 and Richardson numbers Ri=0.0,12.0,28.0. The heat transfer augmentation for SQ-, BS-, and FS-ribs for Ro=0.67 and Ri=28 is 4.2%, 8.6% and 14.9%, respectively, higher than that without the effects of buoyancy. The friction coefficient for SQ-, BS-, and FS-ribs for Ro=0.67 and Ri=28 is 12.8%, 14.8% and 13.3% respectively higher than that without buoyancy.

Large eddy simulation of planar shear flow past a square cylinder has been investigated. Dynamic Smagorinsky model has been used to model subgrid scale stress. The shear parameter, K, namely the nondimensional streamwise velocity gradient in the lateral direction, is 0.0, 0.1 and 0.2. Reynolds number based on the centerline velocity is fixed at Re=21400. The time and span-averaged velocity components, pressure coefficient, Reynolds stresses for uniform are in good agreement with the literature. In shear flow the calculated flow structure and mean velocity components are shown to be markedly different from those of the uniform flow. With increasing shear parameter, the cylinder wake is dominated by clockwise vortices. Both the velocity components in shear flow are compared with respective components in uniform flow. Comparison of normal and shear stresses between shear and no shear case have also been presented. © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Drag and flow-induced sound reduction on a circular cylinder fitted with splitter plate is numerically studied. The numerical simulations of the cylinder, without and with splitter plate, have been carried out at subcritical Reynolds number (Re) of 97,300 using large eddy simulation (LES). Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings (FW-H) acoustic analogy has been used to calculate the sound field. The length of the splitter plate (H) varies from 0.5D to 3D, where D is the cylinder diameter in simulations. It is shown that both drag and sound levels decrease with increasing H initially and then increase with increasing H. However, the values of H beyond which the drag and sound levels starts increasing with further increase in H are different. This provides a multi-objective optimization problem, which has been studied in this paper using the particle swarm optimization method.