Numerical study of heat transfer enhancement over a rotating surface. Part I: Effect of pin-fin shapes.

Rotating machinery like gas turbine engines consist of rotating components like gas turbine disks that are exposed to high thermal loads and stresses due to centrifugal force acting on them, and thus effective cooling is essential. The disks are additionally exposed to hot turbine gas ingress as an adverse pressure gradient is created in the stator-rotor cavity due to outward pumping of near-disk flow. Impingement of a coolant jet on such a surface can effectively provide cooling and also counter this adverse gradient. There also exists a circular relative velocity between the disk and wall-jet formed by impinging air as well as the air in the disk vicinity. Thus, the study of heat transfer under rotating conditions becomes important. With the advent of advanced manufacturing techniques, it is possible to produce disks with novel heat transfer enhancement features such as pin-fins which have not been previously explored. They create unique flow features in addition to increasing the surface area. The present study numerically investigates the heat transfer over rotating surfaces under jet impingement with square, triangular, cylindrical and dome-shaped pin-fins. This will inform the optimization of pin geometry for better heat transfer effectiveness and uniformity. Three different jet Reynolds numbers between 5000 and 18000 based on the jet diameter have been studied for three different Rotational Reynolds numbers based on the disk diameter. Transient non-conjugate heat transfer analysis was conducted, and the technique was compared with experimental results on square pin-fins and a smooth circular disk. The heat transfer enhancement greatly depends on the flow separation and pin area normal to the flow. A heat transfer enhancement of close to 2.2 was observed for triangular fins for the lowest rotation speed, for the highest rotation speed, the highest enhancement of close to 1.7 was observed in the cylindrical pins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]