A saw-tooth plasma actuator for film cooling efficiency enhancement of a shaped hole

This paper reports the large eddy simulations of the effects of a saw-tooth plasma actuator and the laidback fan-shaped hole on the film cooling flow characteristics, and the numerical results are compared with a corresponding standard configuration（cylindrical hole without the sawtooth plasma actuator）. For this numerical research, the saw-tooth plasma actuator is installed just downstream of the cooling hole and a phenomenological plasma model is employed to provide the 3D plasma force vectors. The results show that thanks to the downward force and the momentum injection effect of the saw-tooth plasma actuator, the cold jet comes closer to the wall surface and extends further downstream. The saw-tooth plasma actuator also induces a new pair of vortex which weakens the strength of the counter-rotating vortex pair（CRVP） and entrains the coolant towards the wall, and thus the diffusion of the cold jet in the crossflow is suppressed.Furthermore, the laidback fan-shaped hole reduces the vertical jet velocity causing the disappearance of downstream spiral separation node vortices, this compensates for the deficiency of the saw-tooth plasma actuator. Both effects of the laidback fan-shaped hole and the saw-tooth plasma actuator effectively control the development of the CRVP whose size and strength are smaller than those of the anti-counter rotating vortex pair in the far field, thus the centerline and the spanwise-averaged film cooling efficiency are enhanced. The average film cooling efficiency is the biggest in the Fan-Dc=1 case, which is 80% bigger than that in the Fan-Dc=0 case and 288% bigger than that in the Cyl-Dc=0 case.

Effect of blade sweep on inlet flow in axial compressor cascades

This paper presents comparative numerical studies to investigate the effects of blade sweep on inlet flow in axial compressor cascades. A series of swept and straight cascades was modeled in order to obtain a general understanding of the inlet flow field that is induced by sweep.A computational fluid dynamics（CFD） package was used to simulate the cascades and obtain the required three-dimensional（3D） flow parameters. A circumferentially averaged method was introduced which provided the circumferential fluctuation（CF） terms in the momentum equation.A program for data reduction was conducted to obtain a circumferentially averaged flow field.The influences of the inlet flow fields of the cascades were studied and spanwise distributions of each term in the momentum equation were analyzed. The results indicate that blade sweep does affect inlet radial equilibrium. The characteristic of radial fluid transfer is changed and thus influencing the axial velocity distributions. The inlet flow field varies mainly due to the combined effect of the radial pressure gradient and the CF component. The axial velocity varies consistently with the incidence variation induced by the sweep, as observed in the previous literature. In addition, factors that might influence the radial equilibrium such as blade camber angles, solidity and the effect of the distance from the leading edge are also taken into consideration and comparatively analyzed.