Experimental study of a cooling scheme for a turbine blade trailing edge

The gas turbine blade trailing edge (TE) is one of the critical parts requiring complex cooling schemes to maintain the metal temperature at a level consistent with the blade life span. In this paper, the non-intrusive thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) technique was used to measure the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) in an innovative cooling scheme of the TE of a rotating blade. For this purpose, a scaled model 30:1 was designed to reproduce a wedge shaped discharging TE composed of seven enlarged pedestals. For the two ribbed configurations and for closed and open tip, the average Nusselt number is correlated as a function of Reynolds number from 10,000 to 40,000, Prandtl number, Rossby number varied up to 0.15 and a fraction of blade height. The derived correlations may serve to assess the cooling effectiveness of a blade TE in a real gas turbine application.