Investigation on Influence of Cooling Design in Structural Stability of CMSX-4 made Gas Turbine Guide Vanes

Recent decades researchers attention focuses on minimizing thermal damages of materials in high temperature applications. Even though new materials invented for those applications, the problem still exists. The cooling is imperative for such components regardless of fixed or moving. This research deals with the structural analysis of impingement cooling design as well as a showerhead cooling design on gas turbine vanes made up of CMSX-4 material. CMSX-4 is a single crystal super alloy and developed for high temperature applications. The cooling design influences the structural stability of the guide vane. The investigation includes displacement, stress and strain analyses on both designs. The Pro-E employed for computer aided modeling and ANSYS R14.5 employed for finite element analysis. The results revealed that proposed showerhead cooling design is structurally more stable than conventional impingement cooling design.