Experimental Investigation on the Transpiration Cooling Characteristics of Sintered Wire Mesh in Plain Weave

We experimentally investigate the transpiration cooling characteristics of a porous material, sintered wire mesh. Three samples with different porosities in a plain weave structure are tested with various blowing ratios in an open-loop wind tunnel with a heated mainstream flow. The temperature on the surface of the porous material is measured by an infrared camera to obtain the cooling efficiency. The measurements reveal nonuniform distributions of the surface temperature and the cooling efficiency in both the flow direction and the transverse direction. The averaged cooling efficiency on the surface first decreases and then increases with the blowing ratio, but increases and then decreases with the porosity of the material. The internal cooling by forced convection and its combination with the external film cooling from the transpiration cooling are considered to be attributed to those two cooling characteristics, respectively. Finally, we propose a modified blowing ratio to collapse the minima of the blowing ratio for all tested samples, providing an universal transition for the decreasing and increasing branches for all tested samples in the relation between averaged cooling efficiency and blowing ratio.