Analysis of an Additively Manufactured Cooled Ultra Compact Combustor Vane

The ultra compact combustor (UCC) aims to increase the thrust-to-weight ratio of an aircraft gas turbine engine by decreasing the size, and thus weight, of the engine’s combustor. The configuration of the UCC as a primary combustor enables a unique cooling scheme to be employed for the hybrid guide vane (HGV). A previous effort conducted a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis that evaluated whether it would be possible to cool this vane by drawing in freestream flow at the stagnation region of the airfoil. Based on this study, a cooling scheme was designed and modified with internal supports to make additive manufacturing of the vanes possible. This vane was computationally evaluated comparing the results with those of a solid vane and hollow vane without cooling holes as a demonstration of the improvements offered by this design. Furthermore, the effects of the internal support structure were deemed beneficial to surface cooling when evaluated through comparisons of internal pressure distribution and overall effectiveness. Following the computational study, the vane was manufactured and experimentally evaluated with the results compared to those of an uncooled solid vane. The experimental results validated the computational analysis and demonstrated through pressure and temperature measurements that the cooled vane had a reduced surface temperature compared to the uncooled vane and that pressure distributions supported coolant flow through film-cooling holes.