Turbine vane film cooling: Heat transfer evaluation using high-order discontinuous Galerkin RANS computations

A high-order accurate CFD solver, based on the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method, is here employed to compute the heat transfer, with and without film coolant injection, around a turbine vane extensively tested in a wind tunnel. The numerical solution makes also use of a high-order polynomial representation of the airfoil curved boundary in order to minimize the numerical sources of error, leaving possibly only those related to the physical model adopted. The objective of the work is therefore twofold: on the one hand to provide a detailed investigation, often beyond the reach of the experiments, of the complex flow field arising in a film-cooled gas turbine cascade, on the other hand to ascertain the limits of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach and its associated turbulence model when using high-order accurate methods. The DG formulation is briefly reviewed, as well as the experimental apparatus and the measuring technique, and then the code is applied to the computation of various test cases characterized by different reference Reynolds and Mach numbers. Two-dimensional results (up to seventh-order accurate) obtained both with the high- and low-Reynolds version of the k-ω model employed are presented. Reasonably good agreement between experimental and numerical results is obtained, even though the outcomes are far from being completely satisfactory especially for flow regimes in the low Reynolds number range. This is due to the lack of suitable modeling of the laminar-turbulent transition process taking place around the blade leading edge. Such a complex phenomenon is out of reach of the modeling capabilities of the high-Re k-ω model, while can be roughly mimicked by the low-Re version of the model, which is able to provide a delayed onset of the turbulence quantities along the blade surface. Third-order accurate computation of the three-dimensional turbine vane are also presented in this work and compared with available measurements to investigate the relevant fluid flow phenomena occurring and to discuss significant issues related to an accurate prediction of the turbine wall heat transfer.