In modern gas turbines, the turbine airfoil leading edge is currently protected from the hot gas by specific film cooling schemes, so called showerhead cooling. The present paper shows a numerical study of different showerhead cooling geometries. The 3D finite element program ABAQUS as well as a 2D finite element program have been employed to predict the showerhead cooling performance. In the numerical calculations, the different cooling effects and their contribution to the total showerhead cooling performance have been investigated separately. From the numerical calculations a simple method has been derived which enables the prediction of the performance of a 3D showerhead cooling scheme by simple 2D computations. Experimental investigations on showerhead cooling have been presented in a companion paper [C. Falcoz, B. Weigand, P. Ott, Experimental investigations on showerhead cooling on a blunt body. Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, in press]. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.