Boundary-condition models of film-cooling holes for large-eddy simulation of turbine vanes

In many industrial applications, the mechanical integrity of a surface operating under large thermal loads is ensured by injecting a cold fluid through a series of hole along the surface, forming a thin film of cool fluid shielding the solid surface from external heat. An accurate prediction of the heat transfer provided by these so-called film-cooling systems is crucial to ensure the durability of the cooled surfaces. However, the large-eddy simulation of film-cooling systems is complex and expensive because the in-hole flow must be meshed and simulated. To address this difficulty, the modelling of the film-cooling jet by mean of a dedicated boundary condition has recently been proposed. This paper investigates several potential improvements for this type of model in four geometries: an inclined cylindrical hole, a fanshaped hole and two fanshaped laidback holes. The analysis focuses on the comparison of a spatially uniform injection to a model taking into account velocity and temperature spatial variations at the hole exit. The study also compares a non-turbulent injection to a model with synthetic turbulence injection. The comparisons are first performed using a fine mesh to validate the approach, then using a coarse mesh representative of a mesh that could be used to simulate a cooled nozzle guide vane. The results show that both spatial inhomogeneity and turbulence injection significantly improve the cooling effectiveness predictions in a wide variety of cases. The spatial inhomogeneity is especially crucial for the near-hole behaviour of the flow while turbulence injection is particularly important when the destabilisation of the jet by the crossflow is not sufficient to immediately trigger transition. Using a very coarse mesh, the turbulent mixing is observed to be underestimated with all examined boundary-condition models and the behaviour of the jet is not correctly described for some of the configurations investigated. Although not sufficient, non-negligible improvements are nevertheless obtained with an inhomogeneous turbulent injection compared to the baseline uniform model. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study shows that introducing spatial inhomogeneity and turbulent injection can significantly improve the predictions of cooling effectiveness in film-cooling systems. Spatial inhomogeneity is crucial for near-hole flow behavior, while turbulent injection plays an important role when immediate transition is not triggered.