Numerical study on the effects of multiple inlet slot configurations on swirl cooling of a gas turbine blade leading edge

In this paper, a cylindrical swirl chamber, which can be used on the leading edge of a turbine blade is numerically modeled to investigate the effects of multiple slots at each section of the swirl chamber. The RANS equations are solved using four different turbulence models, and it was found that the SST k - omega model, resulted in the reasonable agreement with the experimental data. Two different chamber types, i.e., swirl chamber (SC) and double swirl chamber (DSC), are considered to be modeled with five different inlet configurations. In all configurations, rectangular inlet slots are located at the beginning and middle sections of the swirl chamber, but the number and direction of inlet slots will change in each configuration. SC and DSC configurations are compared using two different scenarios, where the width of both chamber types are identical in the first scenario and the hydraulic diameters are assumed to be identical in the next one. It is concluded that the comparison according to the identical width is more reasonable in the case of gas turbine blades. Results for the same Reynolds number and coolant mass flow rate confirm that the multiple inlets at each section with proper direction creates stronger vortices, which enhances the Nusselt number by 33% as compared to the base inlet configuration.