Temperature uniformity characteristics of array jet impingement cooling with the maximum cross-flow scheme

Temperature uniformity of the impingement cooling is commonly needed in many fields in order to enhance performance, reliability, and to ensure material quality. In particular, operating life of the hot components in gas turbine depends heavily on how uniformly they are being cooled to mitigate the development of thermal stresses. However, there are rather limited literatures addressing these, and the cooling uniformities of jet impingement in extreme conditions, such as the cooling of turbine vane and combustor liner, are seldom discussed. This study focused on the temperature uniformity of array jet impingement cooling with the maximum crossflow scheme, where the detailed distribution of the nonuniformly cooled areas on the target wall, as well as their correlations with the impinging flow field, and the effects of typical geometrical and fluid parameters on the uniformity were investigated. Results indicated that the arising of the high temperature zones and inverse temperature gradient pairs around them, essentially induced by the entrainment vortex and counter rotating vortex pair in the streamwise and spanwise directions respectively, are the sources of temperature nonuniformities over the impingement target surface. Moreover, increasing the impingement Reynolds number or shortening the jet-to-target spacing for higher jet Reynolds numbers could improve the temperature uniformity.