Heat transfer performance in a rotating swirl cooling channel

Swirl cooling, a highly efficient cooling technology, can be employed to protect the turbine blades exposed to high heat flux. This work focuses on the effects of rotation on swirl cooling. The Reynolds number ranges from 9150 to 27,500. The maximum rotation number reaches 1.91. The findings indicate that a stagnant zone is formed inside the feeding passage, which redistributes the mass-flowrate and thus alters the heat transfer distributions: it enhances heat transfer on low-radius regions but reduces it on high-radius regions. Although film extraction improves heat transfer in stationary cases, rotation suppresses heat transfer around film holes located in low-radius regions compared with the swirl cooling without film extraction. Finally, cubic functions are developed to correlate heat transfer with rotation number for swirl cooling both with and without film extraction.