Contrastive experimental study on heat transfer and friction characteristics in steam cooled and air cooled rectangular channels with rib turbulators

The present experiment compares the heat transfer and friction characteristics in steam cooled and air cooled rectangular channels (simulating a gas turbine blade cooling passage) with two opposite rib-roughened walls. The Reynolds number (Re) whose length scale is the hydraulic diameter of the passage is set within the range of 10000-60000. The channel length is 1000 mm. The pitch-to-rib height ratio, the channel aspect ratio and the channel blockage ratio is 10, 0.5 and 0.047, respectively. It is found that the average Nu, the average friction coefficient, and the heat transfer performance of both steam and air in the ribbed channels show almost the same change trend with the increase of Re. Under the same test conditions, the average Nu of steam is 30.2% higher than that of air, the average friction coefficient is 18.4% higher, and the heat transfer performances of steam on the ribbed and the smooth walls are 8.4% and 7.3% higher than those of air, respectively. In addition, semi-empirical correlations for the two test channels are developed, which can predict the Nu under the given test condition. The correlations can be used in the design of the internal cooling passage of new generation steamcooled gas turbine blade/vane.