Modern gas turbine engines operate at ultra-high temperature conditions, which require sophisticated film cooling scheme to reduce the thermal stress in components and extend their service life. However, film cooling effect is decreased along the streamwise direction due to coolant lift-off after ejection. To reduce the coolant lift-off effect and increase the coolant coverage on the wall, two kinds of plasma actuations, i.e. SDBD (Single Dielectric Barrier Discharge) and DBD-VGs (Dielectric Barrier Discharge Vortex Generators), and vortex generators (VGs) are introduced to enhance the wall film cooling effectiveness. The combined effects of vortex generators and plasma actuations on the wall film cooling effectiveness were analyzed at different actuation voltages and frequencies. The results showed that the SDBD actuation is able to push the coolant closer to the wall thus increasing the coolant concentration downstream of the vicinity of the cooling hole. The DBD-VGs actuation tends to push coolant to both sides, thus increasing the coolant spreading along the lateral direction. The configuration of downwash vortex generators (DWVGs) induces an additional anti-kidney vortex pair (AKVP) near the wall, thereby hindering the coolant lift-off along the streamwise direction. The configurations with DWVGs and SDBD actuation, DWVGs and no actuation, and no VGs and DBD-VGs actuation significantly improve the film cooling effectiveness on the wall. The combined DWVGs and SDBD plasma actuation performs the highest laterally-averaged film cooling effectiveness among the studied cases, which increases the area-averaged film cooling effectiveness by 108.9% compared to the no VGs and no actuation case. The actuation forces provided by DBD-VGs tend to hinder the generation of AKVP, thereby reducing the film cooling effect by 34.3% compared to the only DWVGs case. These findings demonstrate the combined VGs and plasma actuations as a highly effective way for next-generation film cooling enhancement applications.
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