Experimental investigation of effusion and transpiration air cooling for single turbine blade

•First experimental study of effusion and transpiration cooling on the single blade.•Quantitative investigation of the overall cooling effectiveness on the blade.•Qualitative investigation of flow structure via smoke-laser sheet visualization.•Transpiration cooling achieves superior cooling than effusion and internal cooling. A great number of studies have been conducted on a film cooling for turbine blades, which is to prevent thermal damage on blades originated from high turbine inlet temperature. However, film cooling with several rows of cooling-holes results in lifting-off of coolant film and limited cooling on a restricted area due to flow reattachment. In this study, effusion and transpiration cooling were applied to the single C3X blade. A multiple hole-array with a diameter of 0.5 mm was fabricated by the electric discharging machining, and a porous structure with an equivalent pore diameter of 40 μm was manufactured by the 3-D metal additive manufacturing. Experiments were performed in the high-temperature subsonic wind tunnel, which has a freestream temperature of 100 °C and a velocity of 20 m/s. The surface temperature of blades was measured using infrared thermometry with a specially designed protocol to eliminate background radiation errors from the surroundings. Also, the outflow of coolant from blades was investigated with smoke-laser sheet visualization. The overall cooling effectiveness was quantitatively analyzed on the pressure-side, suction-side, and leading-edge of blades. Due to the enhancement of convective cooling through porous media, transpiration cooling achieves 34% and 25% higher cooling effectiveness than effusion and internal cooling each.