Investigating the effect of cooling channel roughness and coolant humidity on the creep life of gas turbine blades

Creep failure is one of the most common mechanisms which determine the life of mechanical components operating at high temperature. Gas turbine blades are among the components which operate at high temperature under mechanical loads. In new designs, cooling flow passes through the inner channels of the blade to decrease blade temperature. One of the main parameters of the cooling system is the coolant’s heat transfer coefficient. In this paper, the effect of wall roughness of the cooling channels and coolant’s specific humidity on the cooling heat transfer coefficient has been investigated. The blade body and cooling channels are regarded as a heat exchanger with a thermal barrier coating and convective- film cooling. For this purpose, the physical properties of the coolant have been considered as a function of temperature and humidity. Then, the influence of the channel’s roughness on the heat transfer coefficient has been investigated and an analytical method has been used to obtain the temperature distribution. The results show that in the rough channels, coolant receives more heat from the blade body and consequently decreases its temperature especially in the critical section. Also, it has been shown that with increasing humidity; the coolant temperature reduces along the blade span comparing with the case of using dry air and consequently, the blade metal temperature reduces with about 2.5 percent. It has been shown that by increasing coolant’s humidity and roughness of the channels in a reasonable range, blade’s creep lifetime can be increased by up to 3.18 times.