Abstract
High inlet temperatures in a gas turbine lead to an increase in the thermal efficiency of the gas turbine. This results in the requirement of cooling the gas turbine blades. Internal cooling of the gas turbine blades with the help of two-pass trapezoidal channels is one of the effective methods used to reduce metal temperatures. The trailing edge of a turbine blade is an especially critical region, where effective cooling is required. The trailing edge can be modeled as a two-pass trapezoidal channel. The software program ANSYS ICEM CFD is used to create the geometry as well as structured meshing and ANSYS FLUENT is used to solve the numerical problem. This paper describes the numerical validation of the heat transfer in a two-pass smooth trapezoidal channel. Different Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes models are tested to find the model that predicts better heat transfer results using the experimental data. It is found that the lowRe k-epsilon model gives better results. In three different cases, the ribs are placed at an outlet pass of the trapezoidal channel. A comparison between the three cases shows that if the pressure drop is acceptable, staggered arrangement is the best option. The overall enhancement of heat transfer and the increase in the pressure drop for the staggered arrangement are about 34 and 10.6%, respectively.