Evaluation of Film Cooling Adiabatic Effectiveness and Net Heat Flux Reduction on a Flat Plate Using Scale-Adaptive Simulation and Stress-Blended Eddy Simulation Approaches

The use of film cooling is crucial to avoid high metal temperatures in gas turbine applications, thus ensuring a high lifetime for vanes and blades. The complex turbulent mixing process between the coolant and the main flow requires an accurate numerical prediction to correctly estimate the impact of ejection conditions on the cooling performance. Recent developments in numerical models aim at using hybrid approaches that combine high precision with low computational cost. This paper is focused on the numerical simulation of a cylindrical film cooling hole that operates at a unitary blowing ratio, with a hot gas Mach number of <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi mathvariant="italic">Ma</mi><mi>m</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> = 0.6, while the coolant is characterized by plenum conditions (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi mathvariant="italic">Ma</mi><mi>c</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> = 0). The adopted numerical approach is the Stress-Blended Eddy Simulation model (SBES), which is a blend between a Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes approach and a modeled Large Eddy Simulation based on the local flow and mesh characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ability of the hybrid model to capture the complex mixing between the coolant and the main flow. The cooling performance of the hole is quantified through the film cooling effectiveness, the Net Heat Flux Reduction (NHFR), and the discharge coefficient <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>C</mi><mi>D</mi></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> calculation. Numerical results are compared both with the experimental data obtained by the University of Karlsruhe during the EU-funded TATEF2 project and with a Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) run on the same computational grid. The use of <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>λ</mi><mn>2</mn></msub></semantics></math></inline-formula> profiles extracted from the flow field allows for isolating the main vortical structures such as horseshoe vortices, counter-rotating vortex pairs (e.g., kidney vortices), Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities, and hairpin vortices. Eventually, the contribution of the unsteady phenomena occurring at the hole exit section is quantified through Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and Spectral Proper Orthogonal Decomposition methods (SPOD).