Numerical Investigation of Circumferential Groove Casing Treatment in a Highly-Loaded Low-Reaction Transonic Compressor Rotor

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 916-927
Author(s):  
Wei Zhu ◽  
Le Cai ◽  
Songtao Wang ◽  
Zhongqi Wang
Author(s):  
Chunill Hah ◽  
Martin Mueller ◽  
Heinz-Peter Schiffer

The unsteady convective flow effects in a transonic compressor rotor with a circumferential-groove casing treatment are investigated in this paper. Experimental results show that the circumferential-groove casing treatment increases the compressor stall margin by almost 50% for the current transonic compressor rotor. Steady flow simulation of the current casing treatment, however, yields only a 15% gain in stall margin. The flow field at near-stall operation is highly unsteady due to several self-induced flow phenomena. These include shock oscillation, vortex shedding at the trailing edge, and interaction between the passage shock and the tip clearance vortex. The primary focus of the current investigation is to assess the effects of flow unsteadiness and unsteady flow convection on the circumferential-groove casing treatment. Unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) techniques were applied in addition to steady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) to simulate the flow field at near-stall operation and to determine changes in stall margin. The current investigation reveals that unsteady flow effects are as important as steady flow effects on the performance of the circumferential grooves casing treatment in extending the stall margin of the current transonic compressor rotor. The primary unsteady flow mechanism is unsteady flow injection from the grooves into the main flow near the casing. Flows moving into and out of the grooves are caused due to local pressure difference near the grooves. As the pressure field becomes transient due to self-induced flow oscillation, flow injection from the grooves also becomes unsteady. The unsteady flow simulation shows that this unsteady flow injection from the grooves is substantial and contributes significantly to extending the compressor stall margin. Unsteady flows into and out of the grooves have as large a role as steady flows in the circumferential grooves. While the circumferential-groove casing treatment seems to be a steady flow device, unsteady flow effects should be included to accurately assess its performance as the flow is transient at near-stall operation.


Author(s):  
H. Yang ◽  
D. Nuernberger ◽  
E. Nicke ◽  
A. Weber

A conservative mixed-cell approach of second-order accuracy is presented and applied to investigate the mechanisms of a self-recirculating casing treatment coupled with a transonic compressor rotor. The mixed cell is a computational cell that may show up at the zonal interface boundary, the face of which is partially solid and partially fluid, if the azimuthal open area of casing treatment does not fully contact with the whole annulus of blade passage. The mixed-cell approach is essentially an extension of the conservative zonal approach by incorporating special mixed-cell handling at the zonal interface and it allows a great flexibility to the grid generation for the patched zones with the best grid topology. The mixed-cell approach is extremely useful for solving the unsteady interaction problems within turbomachinery and its application for simulating the coupled flow through the rotor and the casing treatment is reported. The calculated results and analysis reveal an effective stall margin extension of the casing treatment herein by weakening or even destroying the tip leakage vortex, and expose the different tip flow topologies between the cases with the casing treatment and with the untreated smooth wall. It is found that the casing treatment only slightly decreases the overall efficiency at the design point, but it is beneficial to the overall efficiency at the off-design operating conditions and it can improve the inflow conditions to the downstream stator blade row as well.


2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weimin Song ◽  
Yufei Zhang ◽  
Haixin Chen ◽  
Kaiwen Deng

A compressor blade integrated with circumferential groove casing treatment (CGCT) is optimized in this study. A hybrid aerodynamic optimization algorithm that combines the differential evolution (DE) with a radial basis function (RBF) response surface is used for the multi-objective optimization via the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. The sweep and lean distributions are optimized to pursue the maximum total pressure ratio and adiabatic efficiency at the design point. Constraints on the choking mass flow rate and the near-stall compression ratio are imposed to ensure the off-design performance. The performance is improved much more with the blade-CGCT integrated optimization than with the blade-only optimization. The stall margin of the blade-only optimized blade with CGCT added as an afterthought can be even worse than the baseline blade. The CGCT-removal test for the blade-CGCT integrated optimization result further verifies that the superior performance of the blade-CGCT integrated optimization is obtained via optimizing the coupling between the effects of the sweep and lean on the blade loading and the effects of the CGCT on the flow blockage.


Author(s):  
Christoph Brandstetter ◽  
Felix Holzinger ◽  
Heinz-Peter Schiffer ◽  
Sina Stapelfeldt ◽  
Mehdi Vahdati

The aerodynamic and aeroelastic performance of an advanced axial slot casing treatment (CT) was investigated on a modern one and a half stage transonic compressor test rig. It is generally accepted that a well designed CT can extend the aerodynamic stability range of a compressor to lower mass flows. The extension of stall margin of the compressor rotor blades by using CT has been the subject of numerous research articles but much less attention has been paid to the behavior of the compressor in direct vicinity of the stability limit. For the compressor investigated here, two different phenomena were repeatedly observed near stall: 1) self-excited blade vibration, and 2) low engine order fluctuations developing into rotating stall. The current investigation firstly aims to identify the triggers for each of these phenomena. It then focusses on the aerodynamic and aeromechanical mechanism which lead to the formation of low engine order fluctuations shortly before stall. In order to measure the unsteady and transient effects, the system was instrumented with unsteady wall pressure transducers, a capacitive tip-timing system and strain gauges on the rotor blades. The flow structure in the blade tip region was measured via Particle Image Velocimetry underneath the CT-Cavities. Measurements showed a strong correlation between CT activity and the development of the low frequency oscillations with associated blade vibrations. Using numerical simulations, presented and validated in this paper, this correlation was attributed to an aerodynamic coupling between rotor passages through the recirculation of fluid inside the cavities.


Author(s):  
Haixin Chen ◽  
Xudong Huang ◽  
Ke Shi ◽  
Song Fu ◽  
Matthew A. Bennington ◽  
...  

Numerical investigations were conducted to predict the performance of a transonic axial compressor rotor with circumferential groove casing treatment. The Notre Dame Transonic Axial Compressor (ND-TAC) was simulated by Tsinghua University with an in-house CFD code (NSAWET) for this work. Experimental data from the ND-TAC were used to define the geometry, boundary conditions and data sampling method for the numerical simulation. These efforts, combined with several unique simulation approaches, such as non-matched grid boundary technology to treat the periodic boundaries and interfaces between groove grids and the passage grid, resulted in good agreement between the numerical and experimental results for overall compressor performance and radial profiles of exit total pressure. Efforts were made to study blade level flow mechanisms to determine how the casing treatment impacts the compressor’s stall margin and performance. The flow structures in the passage, the tip gap and the grooves as well as their mutual interactions were plotted and analyzed. The flow and momentum transport across the tip gap in the smooth wall and the casing treatment configurations were quantitatively compared.


Author(s):  
Nishit J. Mehta ◽  
Dilipkumar Bhanudasji Alone ◽  
Harish S. Choksi

Previous studies on circumferential groove casing treatments have shown that the effectiveness of casing Grooves highly depends on their axial location over blade tip. The present work aims to study the flow behavior and its impact on the performance of the compressor stage when the casing treatment grooves are placed to provide different axial coverage over rotor chord in each case. Geometry of a transonic compressor stage was modeled for this study. Flow field solutions for this model with smooth casing wall were obtained by solving steady state 3-D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations for three different grids to prove the grid independence of the solutions. Results obtained with the intermediate grid density were used as the baseline results to compare with results of casing treatment geometries. The basic casing treatment geometry has 10 circumferential groves of width 4mm, depth 16mm and axial spacing of 2mm between each groove. This casing treatment geometry was superimposed over the rotor domain with the grooves extending axially over the entire axial chord (58mm) of rotor blade tip and flow field solutions were again obtained. After that, for each case the grooves are removed from the rear side and axial coverage is shortened. Flow solutions for various axial coverage and hence for various number of grooves are thus obtained and compared. These results depict improvement in the operating range when compared to the Base-line results. Results also exhibit that as the grooves from the rear end are removed gradually, recovery in the overall efficiency is seen in compressor performance. Post processing of the flow solutions confirms the trend and shows that the grooves in the rear of the chord are almost idle not providing sufficient flow to pass over from pressure surface to suction surface of the blade and hence contributing very less towards performance enhancement.


Author(s):  
F. Heinichen ◽  
V. Gu¨mmer ◽  
H.-P. Schiffer

In axial compressors, casing treatments represent a passive method to increase the working range without the need to modify the blade geometry. The majority of the open literature on the topic considers one or several casing treatment variants on the same compressor. The question how one casing treatment and its basic mechanisms can be transferred to a different compressor is only covered in a small number of publications. This paper tries to fill this gap by applying a single circumferential groove type casing treatment to three different transonic compressor rotors. It is demonstrated numerically that the casing treatment is able to improve the aerodynamic performance of all three rotors. Detailed investigation of the flow field near the rotor tip shows that the single circumferential groove works by influencing the interaction between the tip clearance vortex and the shock. Hence, this type of casing treatment can be generalized to transonic rotors with a stall mechanism that is based on tip clearance vortex-shock interaction.


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