Engineering Commons^™

Turbine Cooling System With Energy Separation, James L. Rutledge, Matthew Fuqua, Carol M. Bryant

AFIT Patents

A method and system for cooling an engine and/or vehicle using energy separation is disclosed herein. An energy separation device is operable for separating a compressed gaseous coolant stream into a first relatively cooler coolant flow stream and a second relatively hotter coolant flow stream. The relative cooler coolant flow stream is directed to a first region requiring increased cooling and the relative hotter coolant flow stream is directed to a second region requiring lower cooling than the first region in the engine or vehicle.

Liquid Jet Penetration And Breakup In A Free Supersonic Gas Jet, Hansen Jones

LSU Master's Theses

In the testing of today’s rocket engines, both on large scale vertical test stands and smaller subscale horizontal component testing stands, it is extremely important to be able to accurately quantify and mitigate the thermal and acoustic loads the engines will generate on test stand infrastructure. Due to the large number of parameters that must be considered for many cases, development of a multi-phase computational code is under way to properly analyze and design water spray cooling systems used at NASA’s Stennis Space Center (SSC) and across other NASA centers. As such, a small-scale experiment has been conducted at Louisiana …

Experimental Investigation Of Cryogenic Convection And Boiling In Traditionally And Additively Manufactured Rocket Engine Cooling Channels, Armando Sandoval

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Center for Space Exploration and Technology Research at the University of Texas at El Paso, has designed, built, and optimized an experimental high heat flux test facility to investigate the heat transfer coefficient of liquid methane and other cryogenic propellants for regenerative cooled rocket engine design. The system is composed of a copper conduction based thermal concentrator that delivers heat flow into a single sub-scaled cooling channel (test article). This study focuses on optimizing this design of the high heat flux test facility to develop a more accurate method for measuring the conductive heat flow going into the cooling …

An Experimental Investigation Of Heat Transfer For Arrays Of Impingement Jets Onto The Featured Surfaces With Cylindrical And Elliptical Raised Surfaces, Marc A. Medina

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study focuses on multi-jet impingement for gas turbine geometries in which the objective is to understand the influence of the roughness elements on a target surface to the heat transfer. Current work has proven that implementing roughness elements for multi-jet impingement target surfaces has increased heat transfer ranging anywhere from 10-30%. This study has chosen to investigate three different roughness elements, elliptical in cross-section, to compare to smooth surface geometries for multi-jet impingement. An experimental was taken for this study to extend the current knowledge of multi-jet impingement geometries and to further understand the heat transfer performance. A temperature …

Validation Of A Cfd Approach For Gas Turbine Internal Cooling Passage Heat Transfer Prediction, Daniel G. Wilde

Master's Theses

This report describes the development and application of a validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling approach for internal cooling passages in rotating turbomachinery. A CFD Modelling approach and accompanying assumptions are tuned and validated against academically available experimental results for various serpentine passages. Criteria of the CFD modelling approach selected for investigation into advanced internal cooling flows include accuracy, robustness, industry familiarity, and computational cost.

Experimental data from NASA HOST (HOt Section Technology), Texas A&M, and University of Manchester tests are compared to RANS CFD results generated using Fluent v14.5 in order to benchmark a CFD modelling approach.

Capability of …

Flow And Heat Transfer In An L-Shaped Cooling Passage With Ribs And Pin Fins For The Trailing Edge Of A Gas-Turbine Vane And Blade, Irsha Ashok Pardeshi

Open Access Theses

Efficient and effective cooling of the trailing edges of gas-turbine vanes and blades is challenging because there is very little space to work with. In this study, CFD simulations based on steady RANS closed by the shear-stress transport turbulence model were performed to study the flow and heat transfer in an L-shaped duct for the trailing edge under two operating conditions. One operating condition, referred to as the laboratory condition, where experimental measurements were made, has a Reynolds number at the duct inlet of Re_D = 15,000, coolant inlet temperature of T_inlet = 300 K, wall temperature of …

Pulsed Film Cooling On A Turbine Blade Leading Edge, James L. Rutledge

Theses and Dissertations

Unsteadiness in gas turbine film cooling jets may arise due to inherent unsteadiness of the flow through an engine or may be induced as a means of flow control. The traditional technique used to evaluate the performance of a steady film cooling scheme is demonstrated to be insufficient for use with unsteady film cooling and is modified to account for the cross coupling of the time dependent adiabatic effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient. The addition of a single term to the traditional steady form of the net heat flux reduction equation with time averaged quantities accounts for the unsteady effects. …

Unsteady Effects On Trailing Edge Cooling, G. Medic, Paul A. Durbin

Paul A. Durbin

It is shown how natural and forced unsteadiness play a major role in turbine blade trailing edge cooling flows. Reynolds averaged simulations are presented for a surface jet in coflow, resembling the geometry of the pressure side breakout on a turbine blade. Steady computations show very effective cooling; however when natural-or even moreso, forced-unsteadiness is allowed, the adiabatic effectiveness decreases substantially. Streamwise vortices in the mean flow are found to be the cause of the increased heat transfer.

Toward Improved Film Cooling Prediction, G. Medic, Paul A. Durbin

Paul A. Durbin

Computations of flow and heat transfer for a film-cooled high pressure gas turbine rotor blade geometry are presented with an assessment of several turbulence models. Details of flow and temperature field predictions in the vicinity of cooling holes are examined. It is demonstrated that good predictions can be obtained when spurious turbulence energy production by the turbulence model is prevented.

Variable Area Inlet For Vehicle Thermal Control, Thomas R. Layne, Milton E. Franke, Darrell B. Ridgedly

AFIT Patents

A variable area inlet structure for a vehicle utilizing ram air for coolant is described which comprises a variable area inlet device in the ram air inlet in the form of a butterfly valve, damper, shutter, or similar structure, a temperature sensor in thermal contact with a component within the vehicle to be cooled by ram air flow, a controller and actuator, responsive to the temperature sensor and operatively connected to the variable area device, for controlling the inlet area in response to the component temperature.