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Facilities |
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Penn State ExCCL has several measurement facilities and measurement techniques that allow in-depth research in the gas turbine area. These facilities include a recirculating wind tunnel with a large-scale linear cascade, a recirculating ribbed channel, and a sand plugging test rig for turbine airfoils. Instrumentation used in our studies includes three-component laser Doppler velocimetry, hot-wire anemometry, temperature and pressure probes, infrared thermography and thermal liquid crystals. |
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Figure 2. Combustor simulator located upstream of the turbine vane test section within the wind tunnel. |
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For the gas turbine heat transfer studies, the current focus is on the non-uniformities that enter into the turbine from the upstream combustor. As such, a combustor simulator was designed upstream of a linear turbine vane cascade. Shown above are the heaters and heat exchangers used to condition the coolant and hot mainstream flows that simulate the combustor. The corner of the wind tunnel contains a test section with a linear cascade of a scaled-up turbine vane, which is the first component in a turbine. |
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Figure 1. Schematic of the wind tunnel facility. |
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Penn State ExCCL has a number of different instruments to measure flow fields, thermal fields, and surface heat transfer. The instruments used to measure the flow fields include a hot-wire anemometer and a two-component, fiber-optic laser Doppler velocimeter (LDV) system. A hot-wire anemometer system allows for mean and turbulent measurements of velocity with an intrusive, fast-responding sensor. Thermal and pressure fields are measured using thermocouples and pressure probe rakes. The LDV system is a non-intrusive measurement technique which has the latest signal processors. Surface heat transfer measurements are primarily made using an infrared camera or thermal liquid crystals, allowing for highly-resolved spatial detail. Simultaneous to the experiments, parallel computations are performed using Fluent on SGI workstations. |
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Thermocouple and Pressure Probe Rakes |
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Infrared Camera |
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Laser Doppler Velocimeter |
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Figures 3 and 4. Experimental rigs designed to run steady state heat transfer tests. |
