For many years turbine designers have utilized advancements in film-cooling technology to allow for increased high-pressure turbine inlet temperature. Prediction tools, used to predict the cooling effectiveness of the representative cooling-hole and cooling-hole pattern designs have been successful in keeping the engines on wing for a large number of operational hours, but there is room for and a desire for improvement in the technology. Therefore, a study was undertaken at the OSU GTL to find a way to obtain basic data needed to help improve CFD prediction capability. The particular facility utilized for this work is a medium-duration blowdown facility to which significant improvements in the operational procedure of the cooling system have been made for the purposes of this work and both the facility and the improvements will be described in detail in this thesis.
In order to keep the CFD validation simple, a flat plate configuration with a realistic cooling hole pattern, representative of a high-pressure turbine blade for which measurements obtained as part of a full-stage experiment were obtained, was utilized along with flow properties of current interest to the industry. The measurements reported in this thesis yielded high response heat-flux measurements along the axial direction of the plate, including locations between the individual rows of cooling holes. The influence of Reynolds numbers on heat transfer to the plate was also explored. Lastly, the temperature of the main flow and the test section walls were varied to determine the effect of cooling on the local adiabatic wall temperature.