THE EFFECT OF AXISYMMETRIC PROFILE ON TURBINE BLADE PLATFORM HEAT TRANSFER DISTRIBUTION

Flow field near the turbine blade platform is very complex due to the secondary flow motions such as horseshoe vortices, passage vortices and endwall cross flows. It is therefore extremely difficult to predict the platform heat transfer distribution. As the secondary flows are largely affected by platform profile/shape, a number of investigators have studied different platform profiles to minimize aerodynamic loss and heat load. Understanding of the platform heat transfer has become especially critical in recent years, because of firing temperature increase and low NOx combustion requirement, as it is directly related to turbine durability. Three different axisymmetric platform profiles were designed and experimentally studied: flat profile, dolphin nose profile and shark nose profile. All of them were based on the existing engine hardware designs. The measurements were conducted in a high-speed linear cascade, which consisted of five blades and six flow passages. The test platforms were made of FR4 material and painted with Thermo-chromic Liquid Crystal (TLC). The test article was kept in the plenum located under the cascade at the pre-test condition. At the start of each test, the test blade/article was inserted into the cascade rapidly and then two CCD cameras recorded the color changes of the TLC on the platform surface. Engine representative Reynolds numbers were studied from 300,000 to 600,000 and the corresponding inlet Mach numbers were ranged from 0.12 to 0.24. The upstream section of the flat profile platform showed a typical flat plate heat transfer pattern with boundary layer development. The shark-nose, and dolphin-nose platforms resulted in lower heat transfer coefficients on the upstream region compared to that for the flat profile, and the peak values moved slightly downstream from the leading edge due to possibly different secondary flow patterns. The heat transfer rate increased with increased Reynolds number for all three platform shapes, while the flat profile showed a higher increase rate. Zone averaged heat transfer distributions in addition to local values were also presented to show the effect of platform profile. In general, the flat profile platform resulted in a higher overall heat transfer rate than that for the other two profile platforms, which suggested that a good design of contoured profile platform could reduce the heat load and aerodynamic loss in gas turbine blade.