A numerical method to calculate the cooling performance of a rib-roughened duct

The trend in gas turbine combustor design is to use forced convection cooling with enhanced surfaces instead of film cooling. Therefore there is a need to develop design tools for the combustor cooling channels. This paper presents a numerical method to predict heat transfer and pressure drop in a ribbed rectangular channel by using the k-epsilon model with wall functions. The wall functions are based on experimental investigations of rib-roughened surfaces. In the optimization of the cooling channel the duct height, rib height, rib pitch and rib configuration are the variables while the mass flow rate and pressure drop are fixed. Besides the optimization study, a test case is examined to evaluate the performance of the numerical method.