Stalling Pressure Rise Capability of Axial Flow Compressor Stages

1981 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Koch

A procedure for estimating the maximum pressure rise potential of axial flow compressor stages is presented. A simplified stage average pitchline approach is employed so that the procedure can be used during a preliminary design effort before detailed radial distributions of blading geometry and fluid parameters are established. Semi-empirical correlations of low speed experimental data are presented that relate the stalling static-pressure-rise coefficient of a compressor stage to cascade passage geometry, tip clearance, bladerow axial spacing and Reynolds number. Blading aspect ratio is accounted for through its effect on normalized clearances, Reynolds number and wall boundary layer blockage. An unexpectedly strong effect of airfoil stagger and of the resulting flow coefficient of the stage’s vector triangle is observed in the experimental data. This is shown to be caused by the differing ability of different types of stage vector triangles to re-energize incoming low-momentum fluid. Use of a suitable “effective” dynamic head in the pressure rise coefficient gives a good correlation of this effect. Stalling pressure rise data from a wide range of both low speed and high speed compressor stages are shown to be in good agreement with these correlations.

Author(s):  
P. V. Ramakrishna ◽  
M. Govardhan

There are a number of performance indices for a turbomachine on the basis of which its strength is evaluated. In the case of axial compressors, pressure ratio, efficiency and stall margin are few such indices which are of major concern in the design phase as well as in the evaluation of performance of the machine. In the process of improving the blade design, 3D blade stacking, where the aerofoil sections constituting the blade are moved in relation to the flow. Tilting the blade sections to the flow direction (blade sweep) would increase the operating range of an axial compressor due to modifications in the pressure and velocity fields on the suction surface. On the other hand, blade tip gap, though finite, has great influence on the performance of a turbomachine. The present work investigates the combined effect of these two factors on various flow characteristics in a low speed axial flow compressor. The objective of the present paper is thereby confined to study the collective effects of sweep and tip clearance without attempting to suggest an outright new design. In the present numerical work, the performance of Tip Chordline Sweeping (TCS) and Axial Sweeping (AXS) of low speed axial compressor rotor blades are studied. For this, 15 computational domains were modeled for five rotor sweep configurations and three different clearance levels for each rotor. Through the results, 20°AXS rotor is found to be distinctive among all the rotors with highest pressure rise, higher operating range and less tip clearance loss characteristics. TCS rotors produced improved total pressure rise at the low flow coefficients when the tip gap is increased. Hence there is a chance that an “optimum” tip gap exists for the TCS rotors in terms of total pressure coefficient and operating range, while AXS rotors are at their best with the minimum possible clearance.


1986 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Lakshminarayana ◽  
N. Sitaram ◽  
J. Zhang

The blade-to-blade variation of relative stagnation pressure losses in the tip region inside the rotor of a single-stage, axial-flow compressor is presented and interpreted in this paper. The losses are measured at two flow coefficients (one at the design point and the other at the near peak pressure rise point) to discern the effect of blade loading on the end-wall losses. The tip clearance losses are found to increase with an increase in the pressure rise coefficient. The losses away from the tip region and near the hub regions are measured downstream. The losses are integrated and interpreted in this paper.


Author(s):  
Ambrish Singh ◽  
Nand Kumar Singh

An industrial axial compressor has to meet a wide range of operation requirements. These machines have to run continuously for four to five years before going for overhaul. Hence, overall high level of efficiency may be slightly relaxed to meet this requirement. This requires axial flow compressor design to be more conservative and flexible to accommodate changes required for process industry through modern design & development approaches. This paper deals with finding of optimum flow path configuration that will allow a successful detailed design to follow. The effect of various parameters such as hub to tip ratio, proper selection of design rpm, reactions, work coefficient & flow coefficient has been investigated and selected for optimal performance of the machine. Last stage of the compressor is selected as radial stage with the advantage of reduction in axial length and to provide radial outlet, which is more suitable outlet configuration. Meanline design and streamline analysis for each configuration is determined to find out good operating range (stall-free operation) before starting the detailed design.


Author(s):  
A. Gill ◽  
T. W. von Backstro¨m ◽  
T. M. Harms

This article describes an experimental investigation of the flow structures occurring in a three-stage axial flow compressor during fourth quadrant operation in the incompressible flow regime. In fourth quadrant operation, the flow coefficient exceeds the design value to such a degree that the pressure difference between the compressor inlet and outlet becomes negative, and the compressor acts as a badly designed turbine. The pressure rise characteristic curve thus extends into the fourth quadrant of the compressor map. A three stage axial flow compressor, with a mass flow rate of 2.7 kg/s and a pressure ratio of 1.022 was investigated. The design rotor tip Mach number is 0.2. Three operational points within the fourth quadrant were investigated, at flow coefficients of 0.665, 0.747 and 1.024. A five hole conical probe and a 50 μm diameter inclined hot film anemometer were used in this investigation. Radial traverses downstream of rotor rows and a time-dependent area traverse downstream of the first stage stator were performed. Three-dimensional steady-state and time-dependent numerical Navier-Stokes solutions for single blade passages in each blade row for each of the cases are compared with experimental work. Large wakes were observed downstream of all stator rows, as a result of significant flow separation on stator blades. The area fraction of the flow passage affected by the wakes increases as the flow coefficient increases. Flow through rotor blade-passages is heavily affected by the blade position relative to upstream stator wakes. Due to the effect of the stator wakes on downstream blading, time-dependent solutions using the nonlinear harmonic approximation were found to agree better with experimental results than steady-state solutions using mixing planes between blade rows.


Author(s):  
Wu Dong-run ◽  
Teng Jin-fang ◽  
Qiang Xiao-qing ◽  
Feng Jin-zhang

This paper applies a new analytical/empirical method to formulate the off-design deviation angle correlation of axial flow compressor blade elements. An implicit function of deviation angle is used to map off-design deviation curves into linear correlations (minimum linear correlation coefficient R = 0.959 in this paper). Solution of the coefficients in the correlation is given through the study of classical theories and statistical analysis of the experimental data. The off-design deviation angle can be calculated numerically. The approach requires only knowledge of the blade element geometry. The comparison among 2 classical correlations and the new correlation proposed in this paper shows the new correlation has minimum error over the entire range of incidence angle while classical correlations show high reliability only in a limited range. Experimental data in this paper is collected from NASA’s open technical reports. Rotors and stators are studied together. Considering there is significant deviation angle variation along spanwise direction, only data at 50% span is studied, if possible. The error among experimental data, statistical regressions of the experimental data, and numerical results based on the new correlation is discussed. It has to be noted that the influence of the flow condition other than incidence angle is only being discussed but with less break through.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (19) ◽  
pp. 6143
Author(s):  
Xiaoxiong Wu ◽  
Bo Liu ◽  
Botao Zhang ◽  
Xiaochen Mao

Numerical simulations have been performed to study the effect of the circumferential single-grooved casing treatment (CT) at multiple locations on the tip-flow stability and the corresponding control mechanism at three tip-clearance-size (TCS) schemes in a transonic axial flow compressor rotor. The results show that the CT is more efficient when its groove is located from 10% to 40% tip axial chord, and G2 (located at near 20% tip axial chord) is the best CT scheme in terms of stall-margin improvement for the three TCS schemes. For effective CTs, the tip-leakage-flow (TLF) intensity, entropy generation and tip-flow blockage are reduced, which makes the interface between TLF and mainstream move downstream. A quantitative analysis of the relative inlet flow angle indicates that the reduction of flow incidence angle is not necessary to improve the flow stability for this transonic rotor. The control mechanism may be different for different TCS schemes due to the distinction of the stall inception process. For a better application of CT, the blade tip profile should be further modified by using an optimization method to adjust the shock position and strength during the design of a more efficient CT.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdelRahman Ahmed Kamal ◽  
Alyaa Abdelnaby Thabet ◽  
Mohamed M. A. Elnabawy

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jichao Li ◽  
Juan Du ◽  
Mingzhen Li ◽  
Feng Lin ◽  
Hongwu Zhang ◽  
...  

The effects of water ingestion on the performance of an axial flow compressor are experimentally studied with and without endwall treatment. The background to the work is derived from the assessment of airworthiness for an aero-engine. The stability-enhancing effects with endwall treatments under rain ingestion are not previously known. Moreover, all the endwall treatments are designed under dry air conditions in the compressor. Water ingestion at 3% and 5% relative to the design mass flow proposed in the airworthiness standard are applied to initially investigate the effects on the performance under smooth casing (SC). Results show that the water ingestions are mainly located near the casing wall after they move through the rotor blade row. The pressure rise coefficient increases, efficiency declines, and torque increases under the proposed water ingestion. The increase of the inlet water increases the thickness of the water film downstream the rotor blade row and aggravates the adverse effects on the performances. Subsequently, three endwall treatments, namely circumferential grooves, axial slots, and hybrid slots–grooves, are tested with and without water ingestion. Compared with no water ingestion, the circumferential grooves basically have no resistance to the water ingestion. The axial slots best prevent the drop of the pressure rise coefficient induced by water ingestion, and hybrid slots–grooves are the second-best place owing to the contribution of the front axial slots. Therefore, the hybrid slots–grooves can not only extend the stall margin with less efficiency penalty compared with axial slots, but also prevent rain ingestion from worsening the compressor performance.


1964 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 328-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. T. Howell

SummaryThe following theoretical investigation is concerned with the stability of the flow through a system composed of a multi-stage axial flow compressor followed by a throttle.Such an investigation was carried out by Pearson and Bowmer in 1949. In 1962 Pearson’s work on the analysis of axial flow compressor characteristics, and the accumulation of empirical data regarding factors affecting the surge line, re-awakened interest in the possibility of predicting the surge line of a multi-stage axial flow compressor-throttle system.In this paper the equations governing the stability of flow at any operating point in such a system are obtained by applying Kirchhoff’s laws to the associated electric circuit at that operating point, and the analysis is applied to a wide range of flows of the calculated characteristics of a seven-stage axial flow compressor.A study of the simplest compressor-throttle system is given, in which the equations of motion of the system are derived mechanically and electrically, and the range of validity of the equations and their stability are discussed in order to bring out the relation between the mathematics and physics of the simple system before applying these methods to multi-stage axial flow compressors.For the relatively simple electrical representation used in this paper for an axial compressor of n stages, there are shown to be 2n possible values of p, the transient rotational frequency, and these are determined over a sufficiently wide range of flows on the seven-stage compressor studied.As a result, a region of the compressor characteristic map can be marked out in which all the values of the transient rotational frequency have their real parts less than zero, corresponding to stability of operation, a region where at least one of the values of p is real and positive corresponding to non-oscillatory instability of operation, and an intermediate region where some of the values of the rotational frequency p are complex with positive real part, corresponding to oscillatory instability of operation.It is suggested that the non-oscillatory instability found here is associated with the surge and the line of inception of non-oscillatory instability with the surge line.


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