ASME IGTI Aircraft Engine Technology Award Lecture

The Many Facets of Effective Gas Turbine Film Cooling

1:30pm, Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Speaker: David G. Bogard

Film cooling has been used in the combustors and turbine sections of gas turbine engines since the 1950's and was an integral part of some of the earliest engines. Much of the early research on film cooling focused on quantifying and predicting the cooling performance for slots and rows of cylindrical holes. In the 1980's, shaped film cooling holes were developed which provided increased cooling effectiveness and coolant flow rates relative to their cylindrical counterparts. In this lecture, the development of improved film cooling technology will be reviewed, including predictions of performance with experimentally based correlations and computational simulations. which led to the development of improved film cooling hole geometries. More recently, advances in additive manufacturing have opened the possibility of turbine components being manufactured additively, which greatly increases geometric options. These options and their potential to significantly improve film cooling performance will be considered. Furthermore, recent computational and experimental studies in our laboratory have shown significant Mach number effects when using shaped holes for film cooling. These effects, and the importance of designing film cooling configurations for operation at realistic Mach numbers will be discussed.