To achieve high thermal efficiency in modern gas turbines, the turbine-inlet temperature has to be increased. In response to such requisites and to prevent thermal failure of the components exposed to hot gas streams, the use of different cooling techniques, including film cooling, is essential. Finding an optimum film cooling design has become a challenge as it is influenced by a large number of flow and geometrical parameters. This study is dedicated to some important aspects of film cooling of a turbine guide vane and consists of three parts. The first part is associated with an experimental investigation of the suction and pressure side cooling by means of a transient IR-Thermography technique under engine representative conditions. It is shown that the overall film cooling performance of the suction side can be improved by adding showerhead cooling if fan-shaped holes are used, while cylindrical holes may not necessarily benefit from a showerhead. According to the findings, investigation of an optimum cooling design for the suction side is not only a function of hole shape, blowing ratio, state of approaching flow, etc., but is also highly dependent on the presence/absence of showerhead cooling as well as the number of cooling rows. In this regard, it is also discussed that the combined effect of the adiabatic film effectiveness (AFE) and the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) should be considered in such study. As for the pressure side cooling, it is found that either the showerhead or a single row of cylindrical cooling holes can enhance the HTC substantially, whereas a combination of the two or using fan-shaped holes indicates considerably lower HTC. An important conclusion is that adding more than one cooling row will not augment the HTC and will even decrease it under certain circumstances. In the second part, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) investigations have shown that film cooling holes subjected to higher flow acceleration will maintain a higher level of AFE. Although this was found to be valid for both suction and pressure side, due to an overall lower acceleration for the pressure side, a lower AFE was achieved. Moreover, the CFD results indicate that fan-shaped holes with low area ratio (dictated by design constraints for medium-size gas turbines), suffer from cooling jet separation and hence reduction in AFE for blowing ratios above unity. Verification of these conclusions by experiments suggests that CFD can be used more extensively, e.g. for parametric studies. The last part deals with method development for deriving correlations based on experimental data to support engineers in the design stage. The proposed method and the ultimate correlation model could successfully correlate the laterally averaged AFE to the downstream distance, the blowing ratio and the local pressure coefficient representing the effect of approaching flow. The applicability of the method has been examined and the high level of predictability of the final model demonstrates its suitability to be used for design purposes in the future.
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