Design and Analysis of High Pressure Ratio Transonic Fan Stage

Abstract

A single stage high performance transonic fan has been designed for turbofan engines. Having a high pressure ratio of approximately 2.0, the fan is being designed to imply high efficiency while working in the transonic regime. As the fan is single stage, so it only consists of a rotor part, and no stator part, which makes it less complicated to operate, while it also minimize the weight. Through appropriate literature review, we chose adequate design specifications, which helped us in the theoretical design, through free vortex and relaxed free vortex design. A generic MATLAB code was helpful in verifying the results obtained by these methods. The same way, velocity triangles were also obtained by using the theoretical data of blade angles and velocities, which were then also shown by the software CATIA V5. Based on the design calculations, an airfoil was also selected for the blade, and finally, a 3D CAD Model was designed by CATIA V5 to end our design part. Next up, the design model was validated through the analysis part of this project, as all the aerodynamics, structural, pressure, and temperature considerations could be done through computational fluid dynamics. A domain being selected for meshing of the blade geometry by GAMBIT software, proved to be valuable, as the refined mesh was then imported to ANSYS workbench for analyzing it on the FLUENT Solver. Analysis based on computational fluid dynamics was helpful in completing the final blade design as it is a fine way to verify the preliminary design with numerical solutions, as well as through the simulations which are based upon various equations or algorithms important to analyze the results of different physical quantities acting on the model.