Insights Into Turbocharger Centrifugal Compressor Stability Using High-Fidelity CFD and a Novel Impeller Diffusion Factor

Abstract

Abstract Turbocharger technologies are widely applied in the modern automotive industry to meet increasingly stringent carbon emission standards. To support the continuous enhancement of these tactics, delivering improvement to the performance and stability of turbocharger compressors at low mass flow rate regimes is of paramount importance. The present paper investigated the stability of a turbocharger compressor stage equipped with a ported shroud, using high-fidelity CFD simulations. It was found that the recirculated flow passing through the ported shroud device had primary influence on the flow condition in the vicinity of the impeller tip region (80% to 100% span). This discovery facilitated the definition of a modified impeller diffusion factor (DF), which was applied to the CFD results for three different compressor geometry configurations to lead to the provision of quantitative metrics for impeller stability. Furthermore, the observed change in the limiting impeller DF along the compressor surge line indicated that the dominant components governing the instability of the entire stage had switched, i.e., the stalling behavior of the compressor stage had transitioned from impeller dominated stall to vaneless diffuser dominated stall. Additionally, the limiting impeller DF clearly showed that one of the compressor configurations with a change in the hub endwall recess around the rear of the impeller improved the impeller stability by 3%. By comparison, another configuration with a change to strut geometry in the ported shroud recirculation channel reduced the impeller stability by 10%.