A Study of the Flow Field and Convective Heat Transfer in a Model Rotor-Stator Cavity

Experiments and computations are being carried out with the objective of understanding the turbulent flow field and convective heat transfer in gas turbine disk cavities. An experimental rig which features a configuration of rotor and stator disks simpler than in actual gas turbines but retains the important features of stator vanes, rotor blades, and realistic rim seals on the disks has been constructed for the experiments. The commercial CFD code FLUENT/UNS is used for the computations. We report measurements, in experiments with mainstream and secondary air flows, of the convective heat transfer coefficient and cooling effectiveness distributions on the rotor disk surface. Also reported are the radial distribution of the time-mean static pressure at the stator disk and the circumferential distribution of the same in the mainstream gas passage. Implications of the cooling effectiveness and static pressure distributions vis-á-vis the ingestion of mainstream gas into the disk cavity are discussed briefly. Computational results are presented and compared with measurements in some cases.