Experimental and Numerical Investigation on Cooling and Aerodynamic Performance of Turbine Blade Ribbed Squealer Tip

  • LIU Zhao ,
  • JIA Zhe ,
  • XU Yao ,
  • FENG Zhenping
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  • Institute of Turbomachinery, Shaanxi Engineering Laboratory of Turbomachinery and Power Equipment, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

Online published: 2025-05-06

Supported by

This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project (J2019-III-0007-0050).

Copyright

Science Press, Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025

Abstract

As one of the hottest components of gas turbine, the blade tip is difficult to be cooled down for the complexity flow field in the tight tip clearance. The blade tip protection requires advanced tip structures. To develop new structures, the effect of ribs on blade squealer tip aerothermal performance and cooling performance were investigated. Ribbed squealers tips (1R, 2R and 3R, compared to the Basic case) were designed and their cooling ability under five coolant blowing ratios (M) were measured by the Pressure Sensitive Paint (PSP) technique, taking film cooling effectiveness (η) as the criterion. Numerical method was validated and then was adopted to analyze the flow field and aerodynamic loss in the tip gap. The results indicated that the cooling coverage and η increase with M for sufficient coolant supply. Compared to the Basic case, the η on the middle section is higher while that on the trailing part is lower for the ribbed squealer tips. The flow field analysis showed that the coolant flows downstream to the trailing edge in the Basic case, bringing additional cooling protect to the downstream region. The ribs induce vortices behind them to involve the local and upstream coolant and prevent upstream coolant from flowing down, leading to the improvement in the local and the degradation in the downstream for the film cooling performance. The aerodynamic results pointed out that the ribbed squealer tips are superior to the Basic case in terms of the aerodynamic performance, even though the tip leakage mass flow of these cases are larger than that of the Basic case. The maximum reduction on pressure loss coefficient is 16.2% for the ribbed squealer tip.

Cite this article

LIU Zhao , JIA Zhe , XU Yao , FENG Zhenping . Experimental and Numerical Investigation on Cooling and Aerodynamic Performance of Turbine Blade Ribbed Squealer Tip[J]. Journal of Thermal Science, 2025 , 34(3) : 819 -833 . DOI: 10.1007/s11630-025-2026-4

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