Enhancement of the Thermohydraulic Performance in a Double Passage Square Duct with the Use of Inclined Ribs of 45°: A Comparative Computational Study

The modern gas turbines need to run at very high inlet temperature to promote their power output. Thus, improvements in cooling technologies play a significant role for enhancing the gas turbine blade life. In this paper, thermohydraulic performance (THP) of a two-pass square channel with inclined ribs at 45 degrees was scrutinized employing the k-epsilon realizable model with enhanced wall treatment in ANSYS Fluent. The calculations were performed for the rib pitch to height ratio (p/e) of 5-10, rib height to hydraulic diameter ratio (e/Dh) of 0.1-0.2, and Reynolds number (Re) of 20,000-40,000. Detailed analysis of the flow structure in a double passage square duct was carried out to understand the interaction of the rib and bend-induced secondary flows and its contribution to heat transfer enhancement for the rib configurations with distinct p/e and e/Dh, which was not available in any other existing numerical or experimental investigations. The results revealed that the ribs with higher e/Dh generated the stronger stream-wise secondary flows which led to the augmentation of the cooling performance with the disadvantage of pressure loss increment. The maximum THP of 26.55% was achieved with the ribbed configuration having p/e=5 and e/Dh=0.1 at Re=20,000. The new correlations were developed from the computational data to predict the normalized Nusselt number and friction factor (Nu/Nu0 and f/f0, where 0 is the correlation), taking the e/Dh and flow Re into consideration.