A New Test Facility for Advanced Testing of Variable Inlet Guide Vanes

Abstract

Various experimental and numerical studies of advanced blade configurations for variable inlet guide vanes (VIGVs) were conducted during the past years. Nevertheless, experimental loss characteri-zations of VIGV blade designs vastly focused on the primary profile losses. Secondary flow losses as they occur in a real engine application were often neglected. For this reason, a new wind tunnel facility was erected and commissioned at the Bundeswehr University Munich to enable extensive investigations of application-oriented annular VIGV configurations at typical low subsonic Mach numbers. Five-hole probe field traverses are established by a probe traversing unit in the in-and outflow region of the VIGV. The requirements for a further extension of the applicable measuring techniques by optical methods is moreover provided. Thus, not only profile losses caused by the blades, but also secondary flow losses generated by blade-wall flow interactions and the open blade tips can be resolved in detail.