Experimental Study of the Flow Field Within a Transonic Axial Compressor Rotor by Laser Velocimetry and Comparison With Through-Flow Calculations

1978 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Dunker ◽  
P. E. Strinning ◽  
H. B. Weyer

The flow field ahead, within, and behind the rotor of a transonic axial compressor designed for a total pressure ratio of 1.51 at a relative tip Mach number of 1.4 has been studied in detail using an advanced laser velocimeter. The tests were carried out at 70 and 100 percent design speed (20,260 rpm) and equivalent mass flows corresponding to the point of maximum isentropic efficiency. The tests yielded quite complete data on the span- and gap-wise velocity profiles, on the three-dimensional shock waves in and outside of the rotor blade channels, and on the blade wakes. Some of the experimental results will be submitted, discussed, and compared to corresponding analytical data of a through-flow calculation. The comparison reveals considerable discrepancies inside the blade row between the two-dimensional calculation and the experiments primarily due to the loss and deviation correlations used, as well as to the distribution of losses and flow angles inside the blade channels.

Author(s):  
Shraman Goswami ◽  
M. Govardhan

Abstract High performance and increased operating range of an axial compressor is obtained by employing three-dimensional design features, such as sweep, as well as shroud casing treatments, such as circumferential casing grooves. A number of different rotor blades with different amounts of sweeps and different sweep starting spans are studied at design speed. Different swept rotors, including zero sweep, are derived from Rotor37 rotor geometry. In the current study the best performing rotor with sweep is analyzed at part speed. The analyses were done for baseline rotor, devoid of any sweep, and with and without circumferential casing grooves. A detailed flow field investigation and performance comparison is presented to understand the changes in flow field at part speed. It is found that that at 100% design speed, stall margin improvement is achived by both sweep and casing grooves, but at 90% speed improvement in stall margin due to sacing groove is very minimal over and above the gain due to sweep. It is also noticed that due to reduced shock loss efficiency is higher at 90% speed than at 100% speed.


Author(s):  
Yuyun Li ◽  
Zhiheng Wang ◽  
Guang Xi

The Inlet distortion, which may lead to the stability reduction or structure failure, is often non-ignorable in an axial compressor. In the paper, the three-dimensional unsteady numerical simulations on the flow in NASA rotor 67 are carried out to investigate the effect of inlet distortion on the performance and flow structure in a transonic axial compressor rotor. A sinusoidal circumferential total pressure distortion with eleven periods per revolution is adopted to study the interaction between the transonic rotor and inlet circumferential distortion. Concerning the computational expense, the flow in two rotor blade passages is calculated. Various intensities of the total pressure distortion are discussed, and the detailed flow structures under different rotating speeds near the peak efficiency condition are analyzed. It is found that the distortion has a positive effect on the flow near the hub. Even though there is no apparent decrease in the rotor efficiency or total pressure ratio, an obvious periodic loading exists over the whole blade. The blade loadings are concentrated in the region near the leading edge of the rotor blade or regions affected by the oscillating shocks near the pressure side. The time averaged location of shock structure changes little with the distortion, and the motion of shocks and the interactions between the shock and the boundary layer make a great contribution to the instability of the blade structure.


Author(s):  
Isabelle Trebinjac ◽  
André Vouillarmet

Laser anemometer measurements have been performed within and downstream of a supersonic single-stage high-pressure compressor. At design point and with standard upstream conditions the maximum relative Mach number varies from 1.3 at the tip to 1.1 at the hub. The stage total pressure ratio is 1.84 and the specific mass flow 180 kg/s/m2. The laser two-focus anemometer has been completely designed in the Laboratory; its originality being the use of a counting technique instead of the classical multichannel analyzer one. The data acquisition and reduction procedures are presented here. A comprehensive evaluation of the global flow-field is in the scope of this paper. For that, the intra-blade flow field is described and the shock pattern is discussed. Furthermore, the experimental results are compared with both inviscid and viscous three-dimensional numerical simulations. The viscous computation is based on the Navier-Stokes solution using a mixing length turbulence model. The good agreement observed in this last case shows off the necessity of taking into account the viscous effects in a supersonic compressor flow calculation.


Author(s):  
Marcus Lejon ◽  
Niklas Andersson ◽  
Lars Ellbrant ◽  
Hans Mårtensson

In this paper, the impact of manufacturing variations on performance of an axial compressor rotor are evaluated at design rotational speed. The geometric variations from the design intent were obtained from an optical coordinate measuring machine and used to evaluate the impact of manufacturing variations on performance and the flow field in the rotor. The complete blisk is simulated using 3D CFD calculations, allowing for a detailed analysis of the impact of geometric variations on the flow. It is shown that the mean shift of the geometry from the design intent is responsible for the majority of the change in performance in terms of mass flow and total pressure ratio for this specific blisk. In terms of polytropic efficiency, the measured geometric scatter is shown to have a higher influence than the geometric mean deviation. The geometric scatter around the mean is shown to impact the pressure distribution along the leading edge and the shock position. Furthermore, a blisk is analyzed with one blade deviating substantially from the design intent, denoted as blade 0. It is shown that the impact of blade 0 on the flow is largely limited to the blade passages that it is directly a part of. The results presented in this paper also show that the impact of this blade on the flow field can be represented by a simulation including 3 blade passages. In terms of loss, using 5 blade passages is shown to give a close estimate for the relative change in loss for blade 0 and neighboring blades.


1987 ◽  
Vol 109 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Wennerstrom

Between 1970 and 1974, ten variants of a supersonic axial compressor stage were designed and tested. These included two rotor configurations, three rotor tip clearances, addition of boundary-layer control consisting of vortex generators on both the outer casing and the rotor, and the introduction of slots in the stator vanes. Design performance objectives were a stage total pressure ratio of 3.0 with an isentropic efficiency of 0.82 at a tip speed of 1600 ft/s (488 m/s). The first configuration passed only 70 percent of design flow at design speed, achieving a stage pressure ratio of 2.25 at a peak stage isentropic efficiency of 0.61. The rotor was grossly separated. The tenth variant passed 91.4 percent of design flow at design speed, producing a stage pressure ratio of 3.03 with an isentropic efficiency of 0.75. The rotor achieved a pressure ratio of 3.59 at an efficiency of 0.87 under the same conditions. Major conclusions were that design tools available today would undoubtedly permit the original goals to be met or exceeded. However, the application for such a design is currently questionable because efficiency goals considered acceptable for most current programs have risen considerably from the level considered acceptable at the inception of this effort. Splitter vanes placed in the rotor permitted very high diffusion levels to be achieved without stalling. However, viscous effects causing three-dimensional flows violating the assumption of flow confined to concentric stream tubes were so strong that a geometry optimization does not appear practical without a three-dimensional, viscous analysis. Passive boundary-layer control in the form of vortex generators and slots does appear to offer some benefit under certain circumstances.


Author(s):  
Garth V. Hobson ◽  
Anthony J. Gannon ◽  
Scott Drayton

A new design procedure was developed that uses commercial-off-the-shelf software (MATLAB, SolidWorks, and ANSYS-CFX) for the geometric rendering and analysis of a transonic axial compressor rotor with splitter blades. Predictive numerical simulations were conducted and experimental data were collected in a Transonic Compressor Rig. This study advanced the understanding of splitter blade geometry, placement, and performance benefits. In particular, it was determined that moving the splitter blade forward in the passage between the main blades, which was a departure from the trends demonstrated in the few available previous transonic axial compressor splitter blade studies, increased the mass flow range with no loss in overall performance. With a large 0.91 mm (0.036 in) tip clearance, to preserve the integrity of the rotor, the experimentally measured peak total-to-total pressure ratio was 1.69 and the peak total-to-total isentropic efficiency was 72 percent at 100 percent design speed. Additionally, a higher than predicted 7.5 percent mass flow rate range was experimentally measured, which would make for easier engine control if this concept were to be included in an actual gas turbine engine.


1985 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pan-Ming Lu¨ ◽  
Chung-Hua Wu

A set of conservative full potential function equations governing the fluid flow along a given S2 streamsurface in a transonic axial compressor rotor was obtained. By the use of artificial density and a potential function/density iteration, this set of equations can be solved, and the passage shock on the S2 streamsurface can be captured. A computer program for this analysis problem has been developed and used to compute the flow field along a mean S2 streamsurface in the DFVLR transonic axial compressor rotor. A comparison of computed results with DFVLR L2F measurement at 100 percent design speed shows fairly good agreement.


Author(s):  
Adel Ghenaiet ◽  
Nouredine Djeghri

This paper presents a multi-block solver dealing with an inviscid three dimensional compressible flow through a transonic compressor blading. For efficient computations of the 3D time dependant Euler equations, this solver that we have developed has been cast within a stationary ALE ‘Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian’. The main contribution of this paper is by consolidating this ALE formulation, to alleviate the shortcomings linked to rotation effects and the mixed relative subsonic–supersonic inlet flow conditions, which are now simply implemented through an absolute subsonic flow velocity. The finite volume based solver is using the central differencing scheme known as JST (Jameson-Schmidt-Turkel). The explicit multistage Runge-Kutta algorithm is used as a pseudo time marching to the steady-state, coupled with two convergence accelerating techniques; the variable local time-stepping and the implicit residual smoothing procedure. The adaptive implicit residual smoothing has extended the stability range of this explicit scheme, and proved to be successful in accelerating the rate of convergence. This code is currently being extended to include viscous effects, where fluxes are discretized based on Green’s theorem. To support this solver, an H type grid generator based on algebraic and elliptic methods has been developed. The segmentation of the complete domain into smaller blocks has provided full topological and geometrical flexibilities. The code was used to compute the flow field of a transonic axial compressor NASA rotor 37, and comparisons between the calculations and some available experimental data under the design speed and part speed, show qualitatively good agreement.


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