Heat Pipe Turbine Vane Cooling

The basic feasibility and anticipated benefits to using heat pipe technology to cool the turbine vanes of gas turbine engines are presented in this paper.

This concept involves fitting out the vane interior as a heat pipe, extending the vane into an adjacent heat sink and then transferring the vane incident heat through the vane to the heat sink. An advanced military fighter engine is used as a baseline and the bypass air is the chosen heat sink. The results of this study show a 7.2% increase in engine thrust, a 0.2% decrease in specific fuel consumption with overall engine weight increased by less than 1% by using this technology.