Modern gas turbine systems operate in temperatures ranging from 1200°C to even 1500°C, which creates bigger problems related to the blade material thermal strength. In order to ensure appropriate protection of the turbine blades, a sophisticated cooling system is used. Current emphasis is placed on the application of non-stationary flow effects to improve cooling conditions, e.g., the unsteady-jet heat transfer or the heat transfer enhancement using high-amplitude oscillatory motion. The presented research follows a similar direction.

A new concept is proposed of intensification of the heat transfer in the cooling channels with the use of an acoustic wave generator. The acoustic wave is generated by an appropriately shaped fixed cavity or group of cavities. The phenomenon is related to the coupling mechanism between the vortex shedding generated at the leading edge and the acoustic waves generated within the cavity area. Strong instabilities can be observed within a certain range of the free flow velocities.

The presented study includes determination of the relationship between the amplitude of acoustic oscillations and the cooling conditions within the cavity. Different geometries of the acoustic generator are investigated. Calculations are also performed for variable flow conditions. The research presented in this paper is based on a numerical model prepared using the Ansys CFX-17.0 commercial CFD code.

The highly dynamic and unsteady characteristics of the cavitating flow cause many negative effects such as erosion, noise and vibration. Also, in the real application, it is inevitable to neglect the dissolved air in the water, although it is usually neglected in the previous works to reduce the complexity. The novelty of the present work is analysing the impact of dissolved air on the average/unsteady characteristics of Venturi flow by conducting sets of experimental tests. For this purpose, two different amounts of dissolved air at five pressure levels (i.e. five different sets of cavitation numbers) were considered in the study of cavitating flow inside a Venturi nozzle. The fast Fourier transform analysis of pressure fluctuations proved that the shedding frequency reduces almost by 50% to 66%, depending on the case, with adding the amount of dissolved air. However, the reduction of 14% to 25% is achieved by the vibration transducers. On the other hand, the cavity enlarges as well as bubbly flow is observed in the test chamber at a higher level of dissolved air. Furthermore, it is observed that the re-entrant jet, as the main reason for the cavity detachment, is more effective for the detachment process in cases with a lower level of dissolved air, where the re-entrant jet front penetrates more toward the leading edge.