Cooling of the hot gas path components plays a key role in modern gas turbines. It allows, due to efficiency reasons, to operate the machines with temperature exceeding components' melting point. The cooling system however brings about some disadvantages as well. If so, we need to enforce the positive effects of cooling and diminish the drawbacks, which influence the reliability of components and the whole machine. To solve such a task we have to perform an optimization which makes it possible to reach the desired goal. The task is approached in the 3D configuration. The search process is performed by means of the evolutionary approach with floatingpoint representation of design variables. Each cooling structure candidate is evaluated on the basis of thermo-mechanical FEM computations done with Ansys via automatically generated script file. These computations are parallelized. The results are compared with the reference case which is the C3X airfoil and they show a potential stored in the cooling system. Appropriate passage distribution makes it possible to improve the operation condition for highly loaded components. Application of evolutionary approach, although most suitable for such problems, is time consuming, so more advanced approach (Conjugate Heat Transfer) requires huge computational power. The analysis is based on original procedure which involves optimization of size and location of internal cooling passages of cylindrical shape within the airfoil. All the channels can freely move within the airfoil cross section and also their number can change. Such a procedure is original.
This paper presents the impact of microwave penetration depth on the process of heating the moulding sand with sodium silicate. For each material it is affected by: the wavelength in vacuum and the real and imaginary components of the relative complex electrical permittivity εrfor a selected measurement frequency. Since the components are not constant values and they change depending on the electrical parameters of materials and the frequency of the electromagnetic wave, it is indispensable to carry out laboratory measurements to determine them. Moreover, the electrical parameters of materials are also affected by: temperature, packing degree, humidity and conductivity. The measurements of the dielectric properties of moulding sand with sodium silicate was carried out using the perturbation method on a stand of waveguide resonance cavity. The real and imaginary components of the relative complex electrical permittivity was determined for moulding sand at various contents of sodium silicate and at various packing degrees of the samples. On the basis of the results the microwave penetration depth of moulding sand with sodium silicate was established. Relative literature contains no such data that would be essential to predicting an effective process of microwave heating of moulding sand with sodium silicate. Both the packing degree and the amount of sodium silicate in moulding sand turned out to affect the penetration depth, which directly translates into microwave power density distribution in the process of microwave heating of moulding sand with sodium silicate.