Experimental Study on Rotational Heat Transfer in Rib-pin Composite Trapezoidal Channels with Varied Rib Configurations
Chenghua ZHU, Hao LI, Jiale WANG, Jie WEN
Abstract. The current work conducts an experimental investigation of the heat transfer performance in a rib-pin composite trapezoidal channel. The channel employs ribs and pin-fins as turbulators, with the ribs arranged in two distinct configurations: forward-swept and backward-swept. The inlet Reynolds number (Re) and rotation number (Ro) respectively vary between 8000 and 24000 and from 0 to 0.83. The results indicate that under static conditions, forward-swept ribs enhance local heat transfer, but they provide no improvement in overall heat transfer within the low-radius region. Under rotating conditions, the heat transfer disparity between the leading and trailing walls progressively diminishes with increasing radius. When using backward-swept ribs, buoyancy forces influence the size of separation vortices induced by the ribs, which in turn reduces the overall heat transfer efficiency under rotation, especially when Ro > 0.5. This study demonstrates that in the trailing edge channel of turbine blades with lateral slots, within the commonly employed range of rotation numbers (Ro = 0 ~ 0.5), backward-swept ribs are more effective when combined with pin-fins, enabling optimal heat transfer performance.
Keywords
Turbine Blade, Trailing Edge, Rotating, Heat Transfer, Pin-Fins, Ribs
Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Chenghua ZHU, Hao LI, Jiale WANG, Jie WEN, Experimental Study on Rotational Heat Transfer in Rib-pin Composite Trapezoidal Channels with Varied Rib Configurations, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 1198-1203, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-206
The article was published as article 206 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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