Effect of incidence angle on turbine blade heat transfer characteristics (I) - Blade tip

The present study investigated local heat/mass transfer characteristics on the tip of the rotating turbine blade with various incoming flow incidence angles. The experiments are conducted in a low speed annular cascade with a single stage turbine. The blade has a flat tip with a mean tip clearance of 2.5% of the blade chord. The incoming flow Reynolds number is 1.5×10 ⁵ at design condition. To examine the effect of off-design condition, the experiments with various incidence angles ranging between -15° and +7° were conducted. A naphthalene sublimation method is used to measure detailed mass transfer coefficient on the blade. The results indicated that the incidence angle strongly affects the behavior of tip leakage flow around the blade tip and consequently plays an important role in determining heat transfer characteristics on the tip. For negative incidence angles, the heat/mass transfer in the upstream region on the tip decreases by up to 20%. On the contrary, for positive incidence angles, much higher heat transfer coefficients are observed even with small increase of incidence angle.