Gas turbine blades internal cooling: Design, development and validation of a new rig for heat transfer measurements under rotation

The contribution describes part of the work carried out on a wider research project aimed to set up a new tool to study rotational effects on the heat transfer distribution inside realistic cooling passages for gas turbine blades. Transient thermochromic liquid crystals (TLC) measurement technique is chosen in order to obtain spatially resolved heat transfer data. This obliges to perform the transient measurements with a cold temperature step on the coolant flow, in order to replicate correctly the buoyancy effects induced by rotation. This target is achieved by a new facility which components and working principle have been the subject of previous contributions. In the present paper, the progresses made in the development of the data processing methodology are described at first. Successively, a first step into the demanding rig and methodology validation process is commented by exploiting the results of a wide test campaign on a simple cooling channel geometry.