Cooling structure optimisation of a turbine blade

The trends in gas turbine technology aim to build more and more efficient cycles, which is usually achieved by the temperature increase at the inlet of the turbine. To prevent the negative effects of elevated temperature some actions are taken concerning among others cooling the high temperature components. Since the structure of the cooling system affects the turbine performance, it is essential to carry out the optimisation leading to its best performance. In this paper we tend to show some aspects of passage optimisation for internal cooled gas turbine vanes. In the present study the vane profile is taken as aerodynamically optimal. The analysis boils down to optimisation of the location and size of circular cooling passages within the vane for various number of channels. The analysis is performed by means of genetic algorithm for the optimisation task and FEM for the heat transfer predictions within the blade.