Cooling Performance of Additively Manufactured Microchannels and Film Cooling Holes

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables fabrication of components that cannot be made with any other manufacturing method. Significant advances in metal-based AM systems have made this technology feasible for building production parts to be used use in commercial products. In particular, the gas turbine industry benefits from AM as a manufacturing technique especially for development of components subjected to high heat flux. It has been shown that the use of microchannels in high heat flux components can lead to more efficient cooling designs than those that presently exist. The current manufacturing methods have prevented the use of microchannels in such parts, but AM now makes them manufacturable. However, before such designs can become a reality, much research must be done to characterize impacts on flow and heat transfer of AM parts. The current study considers the effect on flow and heat transfer through turbine cooling features made with AM. Specifically, the performance of microchannels and film cooling holes made with laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) is assessed.;A number of test coupons containing microchannels were built from high temperature alloy powders on a commercially available L-PBF machine. Pressure drop and heat transfer experiments characterized the flow losses and convective heat transfer of air passing through the channels at various Reynolds numbers and Mach numbers. The roughness of the channels' surfaces was characterized in terms of statistical roughness parameters; the morphology of the roughness was examined qualitatively. Magnitude and morphology of surface roughness found on AM parts is unlike any form of roughness seen in the literature. It was found that the high levels of roughness on AM surfaces result in markedly augmented pressure loss and heat transfer at all Reynolds numbers, and conventional flow and heat transfer correlations produce erroneous estimates. The physical roughness measurements made in this study were correlated to flow and heat transfer measurements to generate a predictive model for flow through AM microchannels. The flow compressibility was also found to play a significant role in flow loss through these channels.;Overall effectiveness of film cooling combined with the internal microchannel flow was examined in a conjugate experimental setup. The validity of the experimental conditions was established by matching important dimensionless parameters of the experimental setup to common values found in turbine engines. These results showed that the roughness in the film cooling holes produced higher in-hole convection than those made with current manufacturing methods. The roughness in the holes also repressed the film performance. However, high relative roughness was shown to minimize the impact of coolant feed direction on the film effectiveness of the AM holes.