The ability and efficiency of today’s gas turbine engines are highly dependent on development of cooling technologies, among which film cooling is one of the most important. Investigations have been conducted towards discovering different aspects of film cooling, utilizing both experiments and performing CFD simulations. Although, investigation by using CFD analysis is less expensive in general, the results obtained from CFD calculations should be validated by means of experimental results. In addition to validation, in cases like simulating a turbine vane, performing CFD simulations can be time consuming. Therefore, it is essential to find approaches that can reduce the computational cost while results are validated by experiments.

This study has shown the potential for reduced models to be utilized for investigation of different aspects of film cooling by means of CFD at low turn-around time. This has been accomplished by first carrying out CFD simulations and experiments for an engine-like setting for a full vane. Then the computational domain is reduced in two steps where all results are compared with experiments including aerodynamic validation, heat transfer coefficient and film effectiveness. While the aerodynamic results are in close agreement with experiments, the heat transfer coefficient and film effectiveness results have also shown similarities within the expected range.

Thus this study has shown that this approach can be very useful for e.g. early vane and film cooling design.