Heat transfer augmentation due to coolant extraction on the cold side of active clearance control manifolds

Jet array is an arrangement typically used to cool several gas turbine parts. Some examples of such applications can be found in the impingement cooled region of gas turbine airfoils or in the turbine blade tip clearances control of large aero-engines. In the open literature, several contributions focus on the impingement jets formation and deal with the heat transfer phenomena that take place on the impingement target surface. However, deficiencies of general studies emerge when the internal convective cooling of the impinging system feeding channels is concerned. In this work, an aerothermal analysis of jet arrays for active clearance control (ACC) was performed; the aim was the definition of a correlation for the internal (i.e., within the feeding channel) convective heat transfer coefficient augmentation due to the coolant extraction operated by the bleeding holes. The data were taken from a set of computational fluid-dynamics (CFD) Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations, in which the behavior of the cooling system was investigated over a wide range of fluid-dynamics conditions. More in detail, several different holes arrangements were investigated with the aim of evaluating the influence of the hole spacing on the heat transfer coefficient distribution. Tests were conducted by varying the feeding channel Reynolds number in a wide range of real engine operative conditions. An in depth analysis of the numerical data set has underlined the opportunity of an efficient reduction through the local suction ratio (SR) of hole and feeding pipe, local Reynolds number, and manifold porosity: the dependence of the heat transfer coefficient enhancement factor (EF) from these parameter is roughly exponential.