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.

A numerical investigation of the flow between rotating conical cylinders of two different configurations

The flow between two coaxial conical cylinders is numerically studied for two different configurations, with the inner cone rotating and the outer one at rest. It is found that, in one configuration,at least at a small Reynolds number（Re）, the pressure is a decreasing function of z while in the other configuration, it is an increasing function of z. In the first configuration, the pressure curves for different Re have intersections, while in the second configuration they do not. The gap between two conical cylinders is filled with six pairs of Taylor vortices at about the same Reynolds number and in each pair of vortices in the first configuration, the upper vortex is larger than the bottom one while in the second configuration, the bottom vortex is larger than the upper one.

Effect of boundary conditions on downstream vorticity from counter-rotating swirlers

Particle image velocimetry（PIV） is utilized to measure the non-reacting flow field in a reflow combustor with multiple and single swirlers. The velocity field, vortex structure and total vorticity levels are experimentally obtained using two different boundary conditions, representing a single confined swirler and multiple swirlers in an annular combustor. The influence of the boundary conditions on the flow field at several locations downstream of the swirlers is experimentally investigated, showing that the central vortex in the multi-swirler case is more concentrated than in the single-swirler case. The vorticity of the central vortex and average cross-sectional vorticity are relatively low at the swirler outlet in both cases. Both of these statistics gradually increase to the maximum values near 20 mm downstream of the swirler outlet, and subsequently decrease. It is also found that the central vortex in the multi-swirler case is consistently greater than the single-swirler case. These results demonstrate the critical influence of boundary conditions on flow characteristic of swirling flow, providing insight into the difference of the experiments on testbed combustor and the full-scale annular combustors.