The Impact of Manufacturing Variations on Performance of a Transonic Axial Compressor Rotor

2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Lejon ◽  
Niklas Andersson ◽  
Lars Ellbrant ◽  
Hans Mårtensson

Abstract In this paper, the impact of manufacturing variations on performance of an axial compressor rotor is evaluated at design rotational speed. The geometric variations from the design intent obtained from measurements were used to evaluate the impact of manufacturing variations on performance and the flow field in the rotor. The complete blisk is simulated using 3D computational fluid dynamics 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 along the leading edge and the shock position. Furthermore, a blisk is analyzed with one blade deviating substantially from the design intent. It is shown that the impact of this blade on the flow is largely limited to the blade passages that it is directly a part of. It is also shown that the impact of this blade on the flow field can be represented by a simulation including three blade passages. In terms of loss, using five blade passages is shown to give a close estimate for the relative change in loss for the blade deviating substantially from the design intent and for the neighboring blades.

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Adam R. Hickman ◽  
Scott C. Morris

This research investigated unsteady events such as stall inception, stall-cell development, and surge. Stall is characterized by a decrease in overall pressure rise and nonaxisymmetric throughflow. Compressor stall can lead to surge which is characterized by quasi-axisymmetric fluctuations in mass flow and pressure. Unsteady measurements of the flow field around the compressor rotor are examined. During the stall inception process, initial disturbances were found within the rotor passage near the tip region. As the stall cell develops, blade lift and pressure ratio decrease within the stall cell and increase ahead of the stall cell. The stall inception event, stall-cell development, and stall recovery event were found to be nearly identical for stable rotating stall and surge cases. As the stall cell grows, the leading edge of the cell will rotate at a higher rate than the trailing edge in the rotor frame. The opposite occurs during stall recovery. The trailing edge of the stall cell will rotate at the approximate speed as the fully developed stall cell, while the leading edge decreases in rotational speed in the rotor frame.


2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Subenuka Sivagnanasundaram ◽  
Stephen Spence ◽  
Juliana Early ◽  
Bahram Nikpour

This paper describes an investigation of map width enhancement and a detailed analysis of the inducer flow field due to various bleed slot configurations and vanes in the annular cavity of a turbocharger centrifugal compressor. The compressor under investigation is used in a turbocharger application for a heavy duty diesel engine of approximately 400 hp. This investigation has been undertaken using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the full compressor stage, which includes a manual multiblock-structured grid generation method. The influence of the bleed slot flow on the inducer flow field at a range of operating conditions has been analyzed, highlighting the improvement in surge and choked flow capability. The impact of the bleed slot geometry variations and the inclusion of cavity vanes on the inlet incidence angle have been studied in detail by considering the swirl component introduced at the leading edge by the recirculating flow through the slot. Further, the overall stage efficiency and the nonuniform flow field at the inducer inlet have been also analyzed. The analysis revealed that increasing the slot width has increased the map width by about 17%. However, it has a small impact on the efficiency, due to the frictional and mixing losses. Moreover, adding vanes in the cavity improved the pressure ratio and compressor performance noticeably. A detail analysis of the compressor with cavity vanes has also been presented.


Author(s):  
Subenuka Sivagnanasundaram ◽  
Stephen Spence ◽  
Juliana Early ◽  
Bahram Nikpour

This paper describes an investigation of map width enhancement and a detailed analysis of the inducer flow field due to various bleed slot configurations and vanes in the annular cavity of a turbocharger centrifugal compressor. The compressor under investigation is used in a turbocharger application for a heavy duty diesel engine of approximately 400hp. This investigation has been undertaken using a CFD model of the full compressor stage which includes a manual multi-block structured grid generation method. The influence of the bleed slot flow on the inducer flow field at a range of operating conditions has been analysed, highlighting the improvement in surge and choked flow capability. The impact of the bleed slot geometry variations and the inclusion of cavity vanes on the inlet incidence angle have been studied in detail by considering the swirl component introduced at the leading edge by the recirculating flow through the slot. Further, the overall stage efficiency and the non-uniform flow field at the inducer inlet have been also analysed. The analysis revealed that increasing the slot width has increased the map width by about 17%. However, it has a small impact on the efficiency due to the frictional and mixing losses. Moreover, adding vanes in the cavity improved the pressure ratio and compressor performance noticeably. A detail analysis of the compressor with cavity vanes has also been presented.


Author(s):  
K. Yamada ◽  
M. Furukawa ◽  
T. Nakano ◽  
M. Inoue ◽  
K. Funazaki

Unsteady three-dimensional flow fields in a transonic axial compressor rotor (NASA Rotor 37) have been investigated by unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations. The simulations show that the breakdown of the tip leakage vortex occurs in the compressor rotor because of the interaction of the vortex with the shock wave. At near-peak efficiency condition small bubble-type breakdown of the tip leakage vortex happens periodically and causes the loading of the adjacent blade to fluctuate periodically near the leading edge. Since the blade loading near the leading edge is closely linked to the swirl intensity of the tip leakage vortex, the periodic fluctuation of the blade loading leads to the periodic breakdown of the tip leakage vortex, resulting in self-sustained flow oscillation in the tip leakage flow field. However, the tip leakage vortex breakdown is so weak and small that it is not observed in the time-averaged flow field at near-peak efficiency condition. On the other hand, spiral-type breakdown of the tip leakage vortex is caused by the interaction between the vortex and the shock wave at near-stall operating condition. The vortex breakdown is found continuously since the swirl intensity of tip leakage vortex keeps strong at near-stall condition. The spiral-type vortex breakdown has the nature of self-sustained flow oscillation and gives rise to the large fluctuation of the tip leakage flow field, in terms of shock wave location, blockage near the rotor tip and three-dimensional separation structure on the suction surface. It is found that the breakdown of the tip leakage vortex leads to the unsteady flow phenomena near the rotor tip, accompanying large blockage effect in the transonic compressor rotor at the near-stall condition.


Author(s):  
Roland Rückert ◽  
Mario Eck ◽  
Dieter Peitsch ◽  
Marc Lehmann

Abstract The present work is the first of two papers investigating the operation principle of stall warning quantities. It discusses the use and implementation of novel stall warning techniques based on experimental tests. Each of the addressed techniques is based upon integral statistical analysis of time-resolved wall pressures in close proximity to the leading edge of a compressor rotor. The experiments were conducted on a low speed axial compressor test rig at the Chair of Aeroengines at the Technische Universität Berlin. The compressor suffers from a specific type of pre-stall instability. The signature within the frequency spectrum of this semi-stable operating point is in itself unique and was observed by many within the scientific community on numerous occasions and various axial compressor types, both low and high speed. Strong evidence has been elaborated which indicate that each of those so called stall warning indicator’s functionality is based upon the existence of this prestall phenomena. The first of two indicators is time-dependent as it evaluates the as-is state against surrounding operating points during transient manoeuvres. Furthermore, the impact of varying geometrical boundary conditions, which are known to regularly arise in flight operations, were taken into account. The functionality of the indicator is assured if the instrumentation is adjusted accordingly. The second indicator is mainly a location-dependent quantity as it evaluates the pressure signature along the axial direction within the rotor passage at various aerodynamic loadings. The latter also gave rise to some fundamental and preliminary understanding of the physics behind so called prestall disturbances.


Author(s):  
Mahmoud L. Mansour ◽  
John Gunaraj ◽  
Shraman Goswami

This paper summarizes the results of a validation and calibration study for two modern Computational Fluid Dynamics programs that are capable of modeling multistage axial compressors in a multi-blade row environment. The validation test case is a modern 4-stage high pressure ratio axial compressor designed and tested by Honeywell Aerospace in the late 90’s. The two CFD programs employ two different techniques for simulating the steady three-dimensional viscous flow field in a multistage/multiblade row turbo-machine. The first code, APNASA, was developed by NASA Glenn Research Center “GRC” and applies the approach by Adamczyk [1] for solving the average-passage equations which is a time and passage-averaged version of the Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations. The second CFD code is commercially marketed by ANSYS-CFX and applies a much simpler approach, known as the mixing-plane model, for combining the relative and the stationary frames of reference in a single steady 3D viscous simulation. Results from the two CFD programs are compared against the tested compressor’s overall performance data and against measured flow profiles at the leading edge of the fourth stator. The paper also presents a turbulence modeling sensitivity study aimed at documenting the sensitivity of the prediction of the flow field of such compressors to use of different turbulence closures such as the standard K-ε model, the Wilcox K-ω model and the Shear-Stress-Transport K-ω/SST turbulence model. The paper also presents results that demonstrate the CFD prediction sensitivity to modeling the compressor’s hub leakages from the inner-banded stator cavities. Comparison to the test data, using the K-ε turbulence closure, show that APNASA provides better accuracy in predicting the absolute levels of the performance characteristics. The presented results also show that better predictions by CFX can be obtained using the K-ω and the SST turbulence models. Modeling of the hub leakage flow was found to have significant and more than expected impact on the compressor predicted overall performance. The authors recommend further validation and evaluation for the modeling of the hub leakage flow to ensure realistic predictions for turbo-machinery performance.


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.


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):  
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.


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