Flow control in compressors

Solutions to control unstable flows have already been proposed in the literature (Wilke, 2004; Gourdain, 2009) but are usually applied on isolated blade row configurations. Based on the results obtained with frontier simulations, the most penalizing flows for stability are identified, such as interactions between tip leakage flows and incoming wakes. These observations are used to design original control solutions based on honey-comb, casing treatment, radial slots... Simulations are then performed to assess the capacity of these controls to improve the compressor performance. For examples, some results showed that rotating stall can be suppressed in a multistage compressor and stability in terms of mass flow is increased by +50%.

Contacts: Guillaume Legras, Nicolas Gourdain