Full High Pressure Compressor Investigations to Determine Aerodynamic Changes due to Deterioration

Abstract

The Institute of Jet Propulsion and Turbomachinery of the TU Braunschweig owns a jet engine of the type V2500-A1 from the International Aero Engines AG. To conduct research on the jet engine and its components, computer models are necessary. In this paper, the reverse engineering process of the high pressure compressor (HPC) regarding its aerodynamics is presented. Thereby, the reverse engineering process starts from digitizing newly manufactured airfoils, followed by FEM-calculations to enforce the operating forces on the geometries. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model using these geometries is set up, considering all relevant geometric and aerodynamic features such as bleed ports and the variable stator vane (VSV) system. Using this CFD-model, the compressor map is calculated and afterwards validated by available manufacturing data [18] and by the institute’s jet engine’s test cell data. Because this jet engine is a highly operated and deteriorated one, a map scaling is necessary before comparing the CFD-model with the test cell data. Nevertheless, an adequate agreement of the operating behavior between scaled compressor map and test cell data is shown. To estimate the deterioration level of the jet engine’s compressor and to evaluate the used scaling factors, the tip gaps inside the CFD-model were doubled and the compressor behavior was simulated. The observed effect of reduced compressor capacity and efficiency is in accordance with literature but is not able to explain the amount of the scaling factors completely.