Improvement of the Parallel Compressor Model and Application to Inlet Flow Distortion

Emmanuel Benichou,Xavier Carbonneau,Nicolas Binder,Yannick Bousquet

doi:10.3390/ijtpp6030034

Abstract

This paper introduces a semi-analytical approach which enables one to deal with distorted inflow in axial fans or compressors. It is inspired by the classical parallel compressor (PC) theory but relies on a local flow-loading coefficient formalism. It is applied to non-uniform flow conditions to study the aerodynamic behavior of a low-speed fan in response to upstream flow distortion. Experimental measurements and 3D RANS simulations are used to evaluate the prediction of fan performance obtained with the local PC method. The comparison proves that, despite its simplicity, the present approach enables to correctly capture first order phenomena, offering interesting perspectives for an early design phase if different fan geometries are to be tested and if the upstream distortion maps are available.

Highlights

Improvement of the ParallelIncreasingly stringent environmental constraints push the aeronautical industry to drastically decrease airplane emissions
Later work brought the block fuel reduction to 3.4% [3] and more recent work even concluded that this configuration leads to increasing block fuel up to 5.4% [4,5], largely due to a huge increase in the mass of the propulsive system
body force modeling (BFM) simulations are parallelized with 64 cores and unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulations (URANS) simulations with 512 cores, both using up-to-date CPU performance

Summary

Introduction

Improvement of the ParallelIncreasingly stringent environmental constraints push the aeronautical industry to drastically decrease airplane emissions. Many theoretically promising innovative airplane technologies can be collected under the umbrella term “integrated propulsion airplanes”. These are characterized by the propulsive system being conceived to operate in synergy with other airplane parts for an overall system-level energy benefit [1]. Later work brought the block fuel reduction to 3.4% [3] and more recent work even concluded that this configuration leads to increasing block fuel up to 5.4% [4,5], largely due to a huge increase in the mass of the propulsive system This illustrates how difficult it is to predict the performance of an innovative configuration during preliminary design with an adequate accuracy

Methods

Results

Conclusion