Aerothermal flows

Gas-turbine cooling and high-heat-flux thermal management rely heavily on jet impingement, where complex interactions between turbulence, confinement, and crossflow govern local heat transfer. Our research combines transient liquid crystal thermography, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and inverse transient-conduction methods to resolve spatially distributed heat-transfer coefficients and near-wall flow structures in confined jet-impingement systems. Particular emphasis is placed on narrow impingement channels and wall-integrated cooling geometries relevant to advanced turbine airfoils, where the spent air of upstream jets generates strong crossflow interactions that significantly modify cooling effectiveness.

Recent work extends these investigations to gas-property effects in fully confined impinging jets using air, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, and helium under matched Reynolds-number conditions. Spatially resolved measurements reveal that conventional Reynolds–Prandtl scaling captures much of the heat-transfer behavior for common gases, while low-density gases such as helium exhibit distinctly different cooling footprints and downstream decay characteristics due to viscous dissipation and recovery-temperature effects. By combining high-resolution thermography, thermocouple-response correction, and physics-based scaling analysis, this work provides experimentally validated frameworks for predicting heat transfer in confined gas flows under realistic operating conditions relevant to turbine cooling, compact heat exchangers, and advanced thermal-management systems.