Numerical Study of Endwall Modification with Micro-Scale Ribs in a Turbine Cascade

A novel modification method, the ‘micro-scale’ rib, is proposed to expand cooling coverage for turbine endwalls. However, the introduction of the rib will inevitably affect the flow in the near-wall region. Therefore, the variation in the flow pattern for the traditional model of secondary flow needs further exploration. In this paper, to gain a clearer understanding of the micro-scale rib, the original endwall and three types of ribbed endwalls were adopted to numerically present the detailed flow, film cooling, and heat transfer information for the endwall surface and phantom cooling on the suction side (SS) of the blade. The Ansys code CFX was utilized to solve the 3D Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations, and the SST k-ω was selected as the turbulence model after the verification. The results show that the rib-like vortex changed the flow of the coolant and had various impacts on the cooling characteristics. Although the cooling performance of the ribbed endwall improved, it also had a negative impact on heat transfer in most cases. Compared with the original, the vertical rib cases provided optimal film cooling, with increases of 26.9% and 17.4% for rib spacing values of 8 mm and 10 mm, respectively, with little difference in heat transfer (less than 1%). In addition, the horizontal rib cases presented the worse performance for both film cooling and heat transfer, which indicates that the rib layout should consider a mainstream flow direction for future designs.