A Study of a Modern Transonic Fan Rotor in a Low Reynolds Number Regime for a Small Turbofan Engine

Abstract

In this paper, Reynolds effects on a modern transonic low-aspect-ratio fan rotor (Baseline) and the re-designed (optimized) rotor performance are presented with application to a small turbofan engine. The re-design has been done using an in-house numerical optimization system in Honda and the confirmation of the performance was carried out using DLR’s TRACE RANS stage code, assessed with respect to experimental data obtained from a small scale compressor rig in Honda. The baseline rotor performance is evaluated at two Reynolds number conditions, a high Reynolds condition (corresponding to a full engine scale size) and a low Reynolds number condition (corresponding to the small scale compressor rig size), using standard ISA conditions. The performance of the optimized rotor was evaluated at the low Reynolds number condition. The CFD results show significant discrepancies in the rotor efficiency (about 1% at cruise) between these two points due to the different Reynolds numbers. The optimized rotor’s efficiency is increased compared to the baseline. A unique negative curvature region close to the leading edge on the pressure surface of the optimized rotor is one of the reasons why the optimized rotor is superior to the baseline.