Heat Transfer Committee Best 1994 Paper Award: Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of Heat Transfer in Closed Gas-Filled Rotating Annuli II

Increasing the thermal efficiency by higher turbine inlet temperatures is one of the most important aims in the area of gas turbine development. Because of the high temperatures, the turbine vanes and blades have to be cooled, and also knowledge of the mechanically and thermally stressed parts in the hottest zones of the rotor is of great interest. The prediction of the temperature distribution in a gas turbine rotor containing closed, gas-filled cavities, for example, in between two disks, has to account for the heat transfer conditions encountered in these cavities. In an entirely closed annulus, forced convection is not present, but a strong natural convection flow exists, induced by a nonuniform density distribution in the centrifugal force field. In Bohn et al. (1994), experimental and numerical investigations on rotating cavities with pure centripetal heat flux had been carried out. The present paper deals with investigations on a pure axially directed heat flux. An experimental setup was designed to realize a wide range of Ra numbers (2·10⁸< Ra < 5·10¹⁰) usually encountered in cavities of gas turbine rotors. Parallel to the experiments, numerical calculations have been conducted. The numerical results are compared with the experimental data. The numerical scheme is also used to account for the influence of Re on heat transfer without changing Ra. This influence could not be pointed out by experiments, because a variation of the Re–Ra characteristic of the employed annuli was not possible. It was found that the numerical and experimental data are in quite good agreement, with exception of high Ra, where the numerical scheme predicts higher heat transfer than the experiments show. One reason may be that in the experiments the inner and outer cylindrical walls were not really adiabatic, an assumption used in the numerical procedure. Moreover, the assumption of a two-dimensional flow pattern may become invalid for high Ra. The influence of three-dimensional effects was studied with the three-dimensional version of the numerical code. In contrast to the radial directed heat transfer, it was found that Nu is much smaller and depends strongly on Re, whereas the radial heat transfer is only weakly influenced by Re.