Heat Transfer Coefficient and Adiabatic Wall Temperature Measurements on High-Pressure Turbine Nozzle Guide Vanes With Representative Inlet Swirl and Temperature Distortions

Combustor exit conditions in modern gas turbines are generally characterized by significant temperature distortions and swirl degree, which in turn is responsible for very high turbulence intensities. These distortions have become particularly important with the introduction of lean combustion, as a mean to control NOx pollutant emissions. For this reason, combustor–turbine interaction studies have recently gained a lot of importance. Past studies have focused on the description of the effects of turbulence, swirl degree, and temperature distortions on the behavior of the high-pressure stages of the turbine, both considering them as separated aspects and accounting for their combined impact. Aspects like pressure losses, hot streaks migration, and film-cooling behavior have been widely investigated. Even if some studies have focused on the characterization of the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) on the nozzle guide vane external surface, none of them have addressed this aspect from a purely experimental point of view. Indeed, when inlet conditions are characterized by both swirl and temperature distortions, they represent a severe challenge for the commonly adopted measurement techniques. The work presented in this paper was carried out on a non-reactive, annular, three-sector test rig made by a non-reactive combustor simulator and a nozzle guide vane cascade; it is able to create a representative combustor outflow, characterized by all the flow characteristics described before. A novel experimental approach, which was developed in a previous work, was exploited to experimentally retrieve the heat transfer coefficient and the adiabatic wall temperature distributions on a non-cooled nozzle guide vane. Temperature measurements on the cascade inlet and outlet planes were also used to provide boundary conditions and achieve a better understanding of the investigated phenomena. The results allowed to evidence the effect of the inlet swirl on the heat transfer coefficient distribution, as well as the evolution of the temperature distribution on the vane surface moving through the cascade, constituting the first attempt to evaluate these aspects from a purely experimental point of view.