Stability Enhancement With Self-Recirculating Injection in Axial Flow Compressor

Abstract

Self-recirculating injection, which bleeds air from the downstream duct of the last blade row and injects air as a wall jet upstream of the first rotor blade row, is experimentally investigated after the design of its structure in single- and three-stage axial flow compressors. External injection and outlet bleed air are selected for comparison. Results show that self-recirculating injection can improve the stall margin by 13.67% and 13% on the premise of no efficiency penalty in single- and three-stage axial flow compressors with only 0.7% and 4.2% of the total injected momentum ratio recirculated near stall, respectively. The self-recirculating injection is the best among all the three cases if the influence on pressure rise coefficient and efficiency is comprehensively considered. Moreover, findings indicate that the upstream injection plays an important role in terms of stability-enhancement. The details of the flow field are captured using a collection of pressure transducers on the casing with circumferential and chordwise spatial resolution. A detailed comparative analysis of the endwall flow indicates that the self-recirculating injection can postpone the occurrence of stalling in the proposed compressor by delaying the forward movement of the interface between the tip leakage flow (TLF) and main stream flow (MF), weakening the unsteadiness of TLF (UTLF), and sharply decreasing the circumferentially propagating speed dominated by the UTLF that triggers the spike-type stall inception. Finally, the stall control concept on the stage that first generates stall inception using self-recirculating injection is proposed. This study helps to guide the design of self-recirculating injection in actual application.