Numerical Analysis of Effusion Plates for Combustor Liners Cooling with Varying Density Ratio

Effusion cooling technology has been assessed in past years as one of the most efficient methods to maintain allowable working temperature of combustor liners. Despite many efforts reported in literature to characterize the cooling performances of those devices, detailed analysis of the mixing process between coolant and hot gas are difficult to perform especially in case superposition and density ratio effects become important. Furthermore, recent investigations on the acoustic properties of these perforations pointed out the challenge to maintain optimal cooling performance also with orthogonal holes which showed higher sound absorption. This paper performs a CFD analysis of the flow and thermal field associated with adiabatic wall conditions to compute the cooling effectiveness. The geometry consists of an effusion cooling plate drilled with 18 holes and fed separately with a cold and hot gas flow. Two types of perforations equivalent in porosity and pitches are investigated to assess the influence of the drilling angle between 30 and 90 deg. The reference conditions considered in this work comprehend an effective blowing ratio ranging between 1 and 3 at isothermal conditions (reaching a maximum hole Reynolds number of 10000) and high inlet turbulence intensity (17%). This set of conditions was exploited to perform a validation of the numerical procedure against detailed experimental data presented in another paper. Inlet turbulence effects highlighted by measurements for the slanted perforation were also investigated simulating a low turbulence condition corresponding to 1.6% of intensity. Furthermore the nominal DR = 1.0 was increased up to 1.7 to expand the available data set towards typical working conditions for aero-engines. Steady state RANS calculations were performed with the commercial code ANSYS® CFX, modeling turbulence by means of the k — ω SST. In order to include anisotropic diffusion effects due to turbulence damping in the near wall region, the turbulence model is corrected considering a tensorial definition of the eddy viscosity with an algebraic correction to dope its stream-span components. Computational grids were finely clustered close to the main plate and inside the holes to obtain y+ < 1, to maximize solver accuracy according to previous similar analysis.