Increasing the turbine inlet temperature is one of the most effective ways to achieve higher efficiency. As a result, the heat load of the turbine components has also increased. The blade tip is one of the components that experiences severe heat trans...
Increasing the turbine inlet temperature is one of the most effective ways to achieve higher efficiency. As a result, the heat load of the turbine components has also increased. The blade tip is one of the components that experiences severe heat transfer problems due to the high heat load and difficulty in cooling. Therefore previous studies have shown that many blade tip shapes can reduce the tip leakage flow and heat transfer on the blade tips of gas turbines.
In this study, a numerical analysis was conducted to investigate the effects of the gas turbine blade tip shapes on the flow and heat transfer near the blade tip region. Two blade tip concepts, the triangular grooved tip and the multi-cavity tip blade, were used to control the tip clearance flow. To study the effects of the blade tip shapes, five triangular grooved tips and eight multi-cavity tip blades were designed by changing the relative apex location of the triangular groove and the location of rib in the cavity, respectively. The contour plot of the vorticity and streamline were analyzed to understand the flow over a blade tip in detail. The effect of the leakage vortex on aerodynamic loss was discussed by comparing the total pressure loss, additionally. To compare the heat transfer characteristics, the Nusselt number and heat transfer rate over the tip surface, including the cavity side wall, were analyzed.
Among the triangular grooved tips, the triangular grooved along suction side tip showed the lowest value of the heat transfer rate on the blade tip surface and it was lower than that of the conventional squealer tip by 19%. Among the multi-cavity tips, the multi-cavity tip with the rib in the cavity located in 30% of the axial chord length showed the lowest area for the Nusselt number higher than 1200 and it was lower than that of the conventional squealer tip by 22%.
The numerical optimization design was also conducted to find the optimized model combining the triangular grooved tip and the multi-cavity tip blade. The response surface modeling was adopted to perform the numerical optimization design. The central composite design was adopted for the design of experiment to reduce the design variables. The optimized model showed a good performance in heat transfer compared to the conventional squealer tip.