Unsteady and Three-Dimensional Flow Phenomena in a Transonic Centrifugal Compressor Impeller at Rotating Stall

Author(s):  
Kenichiro Iwakiri ◽  
Masato Furukawa ◽  
Seiichi Ibaraki ◽  
Isao Tomita

This paper presents a combined experimental and numerical analysis of rotating stall in a transonic centrifugal compressor impeller for automotive turbochargers. Stall characteristics of the compressor were examined by two high-response pressure transducers mounted on the casing wall near the impeller inlet. The pressure traces were analyzed by wavelet transforms to estimate the disturbance waves quantitatively. Three-dimensional unsteady internal flow fields were simulated numerically by Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) coupled LES-RANS approach. The analysis results show good agreements on both compressor performance characteristics and the unsteady flow features at the rotating stall. At stall inception, spiral-type breakdown of the full-blade tip leakage vortex was found out at some passages and the brokendown regions propagated against the impeller rotation. This phenomenon changed with throttling, and tornado-type separation vortex caused by the full-blade leading edge separation dominated the flow field at developed stall condition. It is similar to the flow model of short-length scale rotating stall established in an axial compressor rotor.

Author(s):  
Isao Tomita ◽  
Seiichi Ibaraki ◽  
Koji Wakashima ◽  
Masato Furukawa ◽  
Kazutoyo Yamada ◽  
...  

Today turbocharging has become a fundamental technology to realize engine downsizing, which is an attractive strategy for low carbon emissions. High efficiency and wide operating range are strongly required for the automotive turbochargers. Especially centrifugal compressors for automotive turbochargers are requested to operate with high efficiency from the surge limit to the choke limit. The internal flow in a centrifugal compressor is however three dimensional and shows very complex unsteady flow phenomena like a rotating stall and a surging, which have yet to be elucidated fully. In this study the effect of flow path height of impeller and diffuser on flow fields in a transonic centrifugal compressor has been investigated both numerically and experimentally. Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) has been applied and revealed the reduction of impeller exit flow path affects the accumulation of low momentum flow at impeller inlet as well as impeller exit. Also it has been confirmed experimentally the 15% reduction of the impeller exit flow path height can halve the surging flow rate with same choking capacity at pressure ratio of 2.6.


Author(s):  
M. Inoue ◽  
M. Kuroumaru ◽  
S. Yoshida ◽  
M. Furukawa

The transient processes of rotating stall evolution have been investigated experimentally in a low-speed axial compressor stage with three stator-rotor gaps. The pressure traces at 8 circumferential locations on the casing wall near the rotor leading edge have been analyzed by the wavelet transforms. With the appropriate mother wavelets, the evolution of short and long length-scale disturbances leading to the stall can be captured clearly. Behavior of these disturbances is different depending on the stator-rotor gap. For the large and middle gap, the stall inception is detected by a spiky short length-scale disturbance, and the number of spiky waves increases to generate the high frequency waves. They becomes the short length-scale part-span stall cells at the mild stall for the large gap, while they turn into a big stall cell with growth of a long length-scale disturbance for the middle gap. In the latter case, therefore, the stalling process was identified with ‘high frequency stall inception’. For the small stator-rotor gap, the stalling process is identified with ‘long wave-length stall inception’, and supported the recent computational model for the short wave-length stall inception by showing that closing the rotor-stator gaps suppressed the growth of short length-scale disturbances. From the measurement of the pressure field traces on the casing wall, a hypothesis has been built up that the short length-scale disturbance should result from a separation vortex from a blade surface to reduce circulation. The processes of the stall evolution are discussed on this hypothesis.


2002 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 376-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Inoue ◽  
M. Kuroumaru ◽  
S. Yoshida ◽  
M. Furukawa

The transient processes of rotating stall evolution have been investigated experimentally in a low-speed axial compressor stage with three stator-rotor gaps. The pressure traces at eight circumferential locations on the casing wall near the rotor leading edge have been analyzed by the wavelet transforms. With the appropriate mother wavelets, the evolution of short and long length-scale disturbances leading to the stall can be captured clearly. Behavior of these disturbances is different depending on the stator-rotor gap. For the large and middle gap, the stall inception is detected by a spiky short length-scale disturbance, and the number of spiky waves increases to generate the high frequency waves. They become the short length-scale part-span stall cells at the mild stall for the large gap, while they turn into a big stall cell with growth of a long length-scale disturbance for the middle gap. In the latter case, therefore, the stalling process was identified with “high-frequency stall inception.” For the small stator-rotor gap, the stalling process is identified with “long wavelength stall inception” and supported the recent computational model for the short wavelength stall inception by showing that closing the rotor-stator gaps suppressed the growth of short length-scale disturbances. From the measurement of the pressure field traces on the casing wall, a hypothesis has been developed that the short length-scale disturbance should result from a separation vortex from a blade surface to reduce circulation. The processes of the stall evolution are discussed on this hypothesis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Hehn ◽  
Moritz Mosdzien ◽  
Daniel Grates ◽  
Peter Jeschke

A transonic centrifugal compressor was aerodynamically optimized by means of a numerical optimization process. The objectives were to increase the isentropic efficiency and to reduce the acoustic signature by decreasing the amplitude of pre-shock pressure waves at the inlet of the compressor. The optimization was performed at three operating points on the 100% speed line in order to maintain choke mass flow and surge margin. At the design point, the specific work input was kept equal. The baseline impeller was designed by using ruled surfaces due to requirements for flank milling. To investigate the benefits of arbitrary blade surfaces, the restrictions of ruled surfaces were abolished and fully three-dimensional (3D) blade profiles allowed. In total, therefore, 45 parameters were varied during the optimization. The combined geometric and aerodynamic analysis reveals that a forward swept leading edge (LE) and a concave suction side at the tip of the LE are effective design features for reducing the shock strength. Beyond that, the blade shape of the optimized compressor creates a favorable impeller outlet flow, which is the main reason why the performance of the vaneless diffuser improves. In total, a gain of 1.4% points in isentropic total-to-static efficiency, evaluated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) at the exit plane of the vaneless diffuser, is achieved.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (0) ◽  
pp. 195-196
Author(s):  
Hisataka FUKUSHIMA ◽  
Yusuke TAMAGAWA ◽  
Kazutoyo YAMADA ◽  
Masato FURUKAWA ◽  
Seiichi IBARAKI

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Jawad ◽  
S. Abdullah ◽  
R. Zulkifli ◽  
W. M. F. W. Mahmood

ABSTRACTThis paper is a numerical simulation that was made in the three-dimensional flow, carried out in a modified centrifugal compressor, having vaned diffuser stage, used as an auto-motive turbo charger. Moreover, the performance of the centrifugal compressor was dependent on the proper matching between compressor impeller and vaned diffuser, influencing significantly surge and the efficiency of centrifugal compressor stages. In addition, a modified compressor impeller, coupled with vane and vaneless diffuser, has been found to have similar internal flow patterns for both the vaneless and vaned diffuser design. The vaned diffuser effect has been paid particular attention in terms of better analysis where the diffuser was designed for high sub-sonic inlet conditions. Another aim of this research was to study and simulate the effect of vaned diffuser on the performance of a centrifugal compressor. The simulation was undertaken by using a commercial software, the so-called ANSYS CFX, to predict numerically the performance in terms of pressure ratio, poly tropic efficiency and mass flow rate for the centrifugal compressor stage. The results were generated from CFD and were analyzed for better understanding of the fluid flow through centrifugal compressor stage. Conclusively, it was observed that the effect of the vaned diffuser is to convert the kinetic energy into a high static pressure after analyzing the results of the simulation.


Author(s):  
Kazutoyo Yamada ◽  
Masato Furukawa ◽  
Hisataka Fukushima ◽  
Seiichi Ibaraki ◽  
Isao Tomita

This paper describes the experimental and numerical investigations on unsteady three-dimensional flow fields in two types of transonic centrifugal compressor impellers with different aerodynamic characteristics. In the experimental results, the frequency spectra of the pressure fluctuations, which were measured with the high-response pressure transducers mounted on the casing wall just upstream of the impeller, turned out to be quite different between the compressor impellers at stall condition. The simulation results also showed different stall pattern for each compressor impeller. In the compressor impeller with a better performance at off-design condition, the stall cell was never formed despite decreasing flow rate and instead all the passages were covered with a reverse flow near the tip, where the vortex breakdown happened in the tip leakage vortex of full blade and led to the unsteadiness in the impeller. The vortex breakdown happened in all the passages prior to the stall and generated a blockage near the tip. This means that even with the advent of rotating stall the flow could not return to a normal undistorted condition in unstalled region, because all the passages are already occupied by the blockage due to the vortex breakdown. As a result, the rotating stall cell could not appear in the impeller. In the other compressor impeller, the rotating stall cell was formed at stall inception without the vortex breakdown in the tip leakage vortex of full blade, and developed with decreased flow rate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Mischo ◽  
P. Jenny ◽  
Y. Bidaut ◽  
N. Fonzi ◽  
D. Hermann ◽  
...  

Abstract Unshrouded industrial centrifugal compressor impellers operate at high rotational speeds and volume flow rates. Under such conditions, impeller blade excitation is dominated by high frequency interaction with stationary parts, i.e., vaned diffusers or inlet guide vanes. In a previous study conducted on two full compression units of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), the authors identified, characterized, and quantified resonant blade vibration caused by the interaction of the impeller blades with rotating stall cells during severe off-design conditions. This caused significant dynamic stress in the blades. In a follow-up study, this phenomenon was reproduced successfully experimentally under representative off-design conditions in a downscaled test rig and numerically with unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and structural mechanical finite element method (FEM) analysis. The gained knowledge was translated into a new diffuser design philosophy, based on sectorwise circumferential variation of the leading edge angle. This paper presents the patented philosophy, which is experimentally verified on the same test rig configuration in terms of flow path geometry and measurement equipment that was used in the mentioned prior study to assess resonant blade interaction. The results confirm the design aims: rotating stall onset was delayed without affecting the aerodynamic performance of the stage. Resonant blade interaction with rotating stall observed in the baseline diffuser could not be avoided with the two new diffuser designs. However, with the two new diffusers, the induced mechanical stresses in the impeller and the excitability were reduced by up to 12%.


Author(s):  
B. Mischo ◽  
P. Jenny ◽  
Y. Bidaut ◽  
N. Fonzi ◽  
D. Hermann ◽  
...  

Abstract Unshrouded industrial centrifugal compressor impellers operate at high rotational speeds and volume flow rates. Under such conditions impeller blade excitation is dominated by high frequency interaction with stationary parts, i.e. vaned diffusers or inlet guide vanes. In a previous study conducted on two full compression units of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), the authors also identified, characterized and quantified resonant blade vibration caused by the interaction of the impeller blades with sub-synchronous rotating stall cells during severe off-design conditions. The resonant impeller excitation lead to significant dynamic stress in the blades. In a follow-up study the authors have reproduced this phenomenon under representative off-design conditions in a downscaled test rig and successfully reproduced the phenomenon with unsteady Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and structural mechanical Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis. The gained knowledge of these studies was translated into a new diffuser design philosophy, based on a sectorwise circumferential variation of the leading edge angle. In this paper, the patented philosophy by the OEM is presented and verified experimentally on the same test rig configuration in terms of flow path geometry and measurement equipment that was used in the mentioned prior study to assess resonant blade interaction. The results confirm the design aims: rotating stall onset was delayed without affecting the aerodynamic performance of the stage. Resonant blade interaction with rotating stall observed in the baseline diffuser could not be avoided with the two new diffuser designs. However, with the two new diffusers, the induced mechanical stresses in the impeller and the excitability were reduced by up to 12%.


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