Wind-Tunnel Testing of an Inertial Particle Separator Inlet Using Design of Experiments

Abstract

Wind-tunnel tests were conducted to determine the optimum bypass duct area of the inertial particle separator for the aircraft inlet duct. When the area of the bypass duct for the air inlet is excessively increased, the amount of the dumped air to overboard is increased to result in the inlet performance degradation. In the present work, various tests are conducted on an inertial particle separator of the nacelle inlet model with bypass area variations. The tests utilize techniques involving design of experiments and response surface modeling. The effects of the bypass area variation on the bypass ratio of the inertial particle separator system and the performance of the inlet system are investigated. Experimental design optimization is then performed on the basis of two design factors: the bypass area and the engine air flow condition. The experimental results show that the bypass duct area to meet the bypass ratio requirement provided by the aircraft manufacturer can be determined to yield maximum performance on the basis of the regression model.