Impingement jet cooling with ribs and pin fin obstacles in co-flow configurations: Conjugate heat transfer computational fluid dynamic predictions

Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) predictions were carried out for impingement heat transfer with obstacle (fins) walls on the target surface midway between the impingement jets and aligned in the direction of the crossflow (direction of outflow of the impingement cooling air) to minimise the pressure loss increase due to the fins. A single sided flow exit was used in a geometry that was applicable to reverse flow cooling of low NOx combustors, but was also relevant to turbine blade and nozzle cooling. A 10 × 10 row of impingement jet holes (hole density n of 4306 m-2) was used, which had ten rows of holes in the cross-flow direction. One heat transfer enhancement obstacle per impingement jet was investigated and compared with previously published experimental results, for Nimonic 75 metal walls, for flow pressure loss and surface averaged heat transfer coefficients. Two different shaped obstacles were investigated with an impingement gap, Z, of 10mm: A continuous rectangular rib 4.5mm high (H) and 3.0 mm thick and a rectangular pin-fin rib with ten 8mm high (H) pins that were 8.6mm wide and 3.0 mm thick. The obstacles were equally spaced on the centreline between each row of impingement jets aligned with the crossflow. The impingement jet pitch to diameter X/D and gap to diameter Z/D ratios were kept constant at 4.66 and 3.06 for X, Z and D of 15.24, 10.00 and 3.27 mm, respectively. The two obstacles investigated had obstacle height to diameter ratio H/D of 1.38 and 2.45. The computations were carried out for three different air coolant mass fluxes G of 1.08, 1.48 and 1.94 kg/sm2bar. The pressure loss δP/P and surface average heat transfer coefficient (HTC) h predictions for all three G showed good agreement with the experimental results. The predicted results were also compared with the impingement jet single exit flow, for a smooth target wall of the same impingement hole configuration. A significant increase in the overall surface averaged heat transfer was predicted and measured for the co-flow configuration with rectangular pinfins. This was a 20% improvement at low coolant flow rates for the rectangular pin fin obstacles and 15% for the ribs. At high coolant flow rates the improvement was smaller at 5% for the rectangular pin fins and 1% for the rectangular ribs.