Effect of Novel Casing Treatment on the Suppression of Stall Precursor in a Transonic Compressor

Author(s):  
Dakun Sun ◽  
Xiaofeng Sun ◽  
Xiaohua Liu ◽  
Feng Lin ◽  
Nie Chao Qun

A kind of novel casing treatment is proposed to realize stall margin enhancement by suppressing stall precursor in turbomachinery. In view of its different configuration and mechanism, such casing treatment is named as stall precursor-suppressed casing treatment in the present work, or SPS casing treatment for short. In the present work, the experiments of SPS casing treatment are conducted in a transonic compressor J69 Rotor/Stage. The SPS casing treatment which consists of a backchamber and a perforated plate is designed according to a proposed theoretical model. It is noted that the open area ratio of the casing treatment is only 4–12%, which is much smaller than traditional casing treatments with over 50% open area ratio. The tests show that the SPS casing treatment can improve the stall margin by 8–12% for J69 Rotor, and 4–12% for J69 Stage. Meanwhile, the mechanism of stall margin improvement with such casing treatment will be revealed in this investigation. Comparing with the evolution of the precursors without casing treatments, the propagation of the stall inception waves will be suppressed and the non-linear development of the stall process will be delayed under the casing treatment case.

Author(s):  
Christian T. Pixberg ◽  
Heinz-Peter Schiffer ◽  
M. H. Ross ◽  
J. D. Cameron ◽  
S. C. Morris

The beneficial impact of casing treatments on the stall margin of tip-critical compressors has been proven many times. However, there is still no simple and general method to predict their actual effectiveness. The present work considers the axial velocity deficit that is generally observed at the blade tip. This so called tip-blockage is caused by the tip clearance flow. That is investigated for different configurations of the transonic compressor test facilities in Darmstadt and Notre Dame and the results are presented in this paper. Similar circumferential groove casing treatments were applied to different single-stage and 1.5-stage compressors. They all had a tip critical behavior in common, but exhibited different design philosophies. The effectiveness of similar casing treatments on different stages was observed. A new method for calculating tip-blockage is introduced based on compressor performance and the results of a through-flow tool. A direct link between blockage growth and stall margin improvement was found for circumferential grooves casing treatments. Additionally, the results of an axial slot casing treatment are taken into account.


2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dakun Sun ◽  
Chaoqun Nie ◽  
Xiaohua Liu ◽  
Feng Lin ◽  
Xiaofeng Sun

A kind of casing treatment, named as stall precursor-suppressed (SPS), has been developed recently, which was proved to be able to effectively improve stall margin (SM) without significant efficiency loss in low-speed axial flow compressors and a transonic compressor rotor. In this paper, the effectiveness of the SPS casing treatment is investigated in a single-stage transonic compressor. Based on an extended stall inception model, the quantitative evaluation of the SM enhancement by the SPS casing treatment is presented for the transonic compressor stage. The model predicts that a 2.5–6.8% of stall margin improvement (SMI), which is defined in terms of mass flow rate at stall inception, can be achieved at the design rotational speed. The experimental results show that the SPS casing treatment can achieve 3.5–9.3% of the SMI at 95% design rotational speed. Due to the fact that the distributions of the total pressure ratio along the spanwise direction are kept the same as those of the solid wall casing at the same mass flow rate, the SPS casing treatments with a small open area ratio and large backchamber enhance the SM without a recognizable efficiency loss and a migration of the pressure-rise characteristics. Furthermore, the mechanism of SMI with the SPS casing treatment is investigated in the experiments. In comparison with the solid wall casing, the emergence and the evolution of the stall inception waves are suppressed and the nonlinear development of the stall process is delayed with the SPS casing treatment.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dakun Sun ◽  
Xiaohua Liu ◽  
Xiaofeng Sun

It is known that a kind of stall precursor-suppressed (SPS) casing treatment can be used to enhance compressor stall margin (SM) without recognizable efficiency loss. The further requirement in this regard is to develop an effective way to determine the variation range of the SM improvement during the design of such SPS casing treatment. In this investigation, based on the extrapolation hypothesis and the existing work, an extended stall inception model for quantitative evaluation of the SM enhancement is presented for both subsonic and transonic compressors with the SPS casing treatment. The capability of the extended model to quantitatively evaluate the SM enhancement with the SPS casing treatment is validated against the experimental data. The quantitative evaluation results show that the SPS casing treatments with different geometric parameters can improve the SM by a diverse percentage. In particular, for the facilities used in the present investigation, the experiments show that the SPS casing treatments can cause relevant increases of the SM. The change trend of the SM enhancement with various design parameters of the SPS casing treatment is in line with the corresponding theoretical results.


Aerospace ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Marco Porro ◽  
Richard Jefferson-Loveday ◽  
Ernesto Benini

This work focuses its attention on possibilities to enhance the stability of an axial compressor using a casing treatment technique. Circumferential grooves machined into the case are considered and their performances evaluated using three-dimensional steady state computational simulations. The effects of rectangular and new T-shape grooves on NASA Rotor 37 performances are investigated, resolving in detail the flow field near the blade tip in order to understand the stall inception delay mechanism produced by the casing treatment. First, a validation of the computational model was carried out analysing a smooth wall case without grooves. The comparisons of the total pressure ratio, total temperature ratio and adiabatic efficiency profiles with experimental data highlighted the accuracy and validity of the model. Then, the results for a rectangular groove chosen as the baseline case demonstrated that the groove interacts with the tip leakage flow, weakening the vortex breakdown and reducing the separation at the blade suction side. These effects delay stall inception, improving compressor stability. New T-shape grooves were designed keeping the volume as a constant parameter and their performances were evaluated in terms of stall margin improvement and efficiency variation. All the configurations showed a common efficiency loss near the peak condition and some of them revealed a stall margin improvement with respect to the baseline. Due to their reduced depth, these new configurations are interesting because they enable the use of a thinner light-weight compressor case as is desirable in aerospace applications.


2016 ◽  
Vol 139 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyril Guinet ◽  
André Inzenhofer ◽  
Volker Gümmer

The design space of axial-flow compressors is restricted by stability issues. Different axial-type casing treatments (CTs) have shown their ability to enhance compressor stability and to influence efficiency. Casing treatments have proven to be effective, but there still is need for more detailed investigations and gain of understanding for the underlying flow mechanism. Casing treatments are known to have a multitude of effects on the near-casing 3D flow field. For transonic compressor rotors, these are more complex, as super- and subsonic flow regions alternate while interacting with the casing treatment. To derive design rules, it is important to quantify the influence of the casing treatment on the different tip flow phenomena. Designing a casing treatment in a way that it antagonizes only the deteriorating secondary flow effects can be seen as a method to enhance stability while increasing efficiency. The numerical studies are carried out on a tip-critical rotor of a 1.5-stage transonic axial compressor. The examined recirculating tip blowing casing treatment (TBCT) consists of a recirculating channel with an air off-take above the rotor and an injection nozzle in front of the rotor. The design and functioning of the casing treatment are influenced by various parameters. A variation of the geometry of the tip blowing, more specifically the nozzle aspect ratio, the axial position, or the tangential orientation of the injection port, was carried out to identify key levers. The tip blowing casing treatment is defined as a parameterized geometric model and is automatically meshed. A sensitivity analysis of the respective design parameters of the tip blowing is carried out on a single rotor row. Their impact on overall efficiency and their ability to improve stall margin are evaluated. The study is carried out using unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) simulations.


Author(s):  
Tim Houghton ◽  
Ivor Day

This paper concerns the optimisation of casing grooves and the important influence of stall inception mechanism on groove performance. Installing casing grooves is a well known technique for improving the stable operating range of a compressor, but the wide-spread use of grooves is restricted by the loss of efficiency and flow capacity. In this paper, laboratory tests are used to examine the conditions under which casing treatment can be used to greatest effect. The use of a single casing groove was investigated in a recently published companion paper. The current work extends this to multiple-groove treatments and considers their performance in relation to stall inception mechanisms. Here it is shown that the stall margin gain from multiple grooves is less than the sum of the gains if the grooves were used individually. By contrast, the loss of efficiency is additive as the number of grooves increases. It is then shown that casing grooves give the greatest stall margin improvement when used in a compressor which exhibits spike-type stall inception, while modal activity before stall can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the grooves. This finding highlights the importance of being able to predict the stall inception mechanism which might occur in a given compressor before and after grooves are added. Some published prediction techniques are therefore examined, but found wanting. Lastly, it is shown that casing grooves can, in some cases, be used to remove rotor blades and produce a more efficient, stable and light-weight rotor.


Author(s):  
HaoGuang Zhang ◽  
XuDong Zhang ◽  
YanHui Wu ◽  
WuLi Chu ◽  
HaiYang Kuang

The objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of cross-blade slot casing treatment on the stability and performance of an axial flow compressor rotor. The experimental and unsteady calculated results both show that cross-blade slot casing treatment can generate about 22% stall margin improvement, and the compressor peak efficiency is reduced by about 13%. The detailed flow-field analyses indicate that the sucked and injected flow caused by the slots of cross-blade slot casing treatment can restrain the rotor tip passage blockage, which is made by the low energy tip clearance leakage vortex. When cross-blade slot casing treatment is applied, not only the rotor wheel flange work becomes lower in most of the rotor blade span, but also the flow loss in the blade tip passage becomes fairly large due to the strong interaction between the mainstream and the injected flows made by the slots. As a result, the compressor total pressure ratio and efficiency for cross-blade slot casing treatment are reduced obviously. Three kinds of new cross-blade slot casing treatment were designed according to the previous successful experience and investigated in this paper. The numerical results show that the new three cross-blade slot casing treatments both generate about 54% stall margin improvement at the cost of minor peak efficiency. For one new cross-blade slot casing treatment (CSCT2), the compressor peak efficiency is reduced by about 0.3%. The low energy TLV, which is present for cross-blade slot casing treatment, is removed by the strong sucked flow made by CSCT2. Moreover, the interaction between the mainstream and the injected flows caused by CSCT2 becomes weak obviously, and the corresponding flow loss is reduced greatly. Hence, the compressor stability and performance with CSCT2 are higher than those with cross-blade slot casing treatment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guoming Zhu ◽  
Bo Yang

Abstract A multi-objective optimization of a coupled casing treatment (CCT) for an axial transonic compressor is performed in this study. The coupled casing treatment is the basis axial slots with a circumferential groove located at various positions along the slots. During the optimization stage, five important parameters to control the geometry are used as the optimal variables. The stall margin and the peak efficiency are selected as the optimal objectives. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II coupled with radial basis function (RBF) approximation is used to search for Pareto-optimal solutions. Then, four optimal configurations are selected from Pareto-front for further analysis. As shown in the simulation results with and without the coupled casing treatments, the leakage flow is reenergized and the blocking region near the blade leading edge at rotor tip is decreased by the use of these structures under the low flowrate condition, which is the main reason for stability enhancement. Besides, a coupled casing treatment with the groove settled near the end of the basis slots have the potential to generate more injection flow and extend the operating range of compressor further.


Author(s):  
Juan Du ◽  
Joerg R. Seume

Casing treatments (CTs) have been proved to beneficially affect the behavior of tip clearance flow and compressor stability. This paper presents the design of casing treatment for a mixed-flow compressor with a very small tip gap of 0.1mm. In the first part, the potential of applying two traditional types of casing treatments, i.e. circumferential grooves and axial slots, to enhance the stability of a mixed-flow compressor is investigated. The flow details in the reference compressor with smooth casing are examined first. It is found that a separating vortex is formed due to the reversed flow on the blade suction side near the rotor trailing edge at the near-stall point. It is supposed to be responsible for the decrease in total pressure ratio when the compressor approaches to stall. The numerical stall, i.e. the breakdown of the simulation, is initiated from the spillage of tip leakage flow over the rotor blade leading edge. The effect of circumferential grooves on the compressor performances is not remarkable. The implement of axial slots ameliorates the total pressure ratio and extend the flow range substantially, but with higher efficiency penalty than the circumferential grooves. The recirculation formed in the axial skewed slots eliminates the separation vortex near the trailing edge and suppresses the spillage of the tip leakage flow forward the rotor leading edge simultaneously. The axial skewed slots are further designed and optimized numerically by DoE (Design of Experiments). As DoE factors the axial length, the height, the open area ratio, and the number per blade passage of the slots are varied. Their effects on the two target values stall margin and polytropic efficiency are investigated. The plot of stall margin improvement (SMI) with a function of the peak efficiency improvement (PEI) indicates that the SMI changes reversely with the PE. There are two trends in the correlation curves of SMI with PE. For the configurations with the open area ratio of 20%, the SMI is changed from 9% to 23% with 1% decrease in PE by varying other three factors. For the CTs with the open area ratio of 60% the augment in SMI from 17.8% to 26.3% produces extra efficiency loss of 4.2%.


2011 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Houghton ◽  
Ivor Day

This paper concerns the optimization of casing grooves and the important influence of stall inception mechanism on groove performance. Installing casing grooves is a well known technique for improving the stable operating range of a compressor, but the wide-spread use of grooves is restricted by the loss of efficiency and flow capacity. In this paper, laboratory tests are used to examine the conditions under which casing treatment can be used to greatest effect. The use of a single casing groove was investigated in a recently published companion paper. The current work extends this to multiple-groove treatments and considers their performance in relation to stall inception mechanisms. Here it is shown that the stall margin gain from multiple grooves is less than the sum of the gains if the grooves were used individually. By contrast, the loss of efficiency is additive as the number of grooves increases. It is then shown that casing grooves give the greatest stall margin improvement when used in a compressor, that exhibits spike-type stall inception, while modal activity before stall can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the grooves. This finding highlights the importance of being able to predict which stall inception mechanism might occur in a given compressor before and after grooves are added. Some published prediction techniques are therefore examined, but found wanting. Lastly, it is shown that casing grooves can, in some cases, be used to remove rotor blades and produce a more efficient, stable, and light-weight rotor.


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