Measurement of Cooling Holes in Gas Turbine Blades Using Computed Tomography

Abstract

Turbine blade cooling holes are small, angled, and largely hidden inside the casting, which makes them awkward for any single measurement technique. Greg Robinson sets out the background to the project and the approach chosen: surface measurement and subsurface computed tomography, combined into one geometric analysis so that hole parameters can be extracted from the merged data rather than from either source alone. The measured geometry then feeds an APOLLO computational fluid dynamics assessment of cooling film effectiveness – the question the measurement existed to answer in the first place.