The effects of part-speed geometry changes on the performance of an aeroengine centrifugal compressor are evaluated. In many applications, impellers are often of a high-flow-coefficient, high-specific-speed design. When coupled with the high rotational speeds and high temperature ratios of modern impellers, significant deformation occurs as the compressor moves across its operating range from low speeds to high speeds. At each operating speed studied, the impeller geometry was deformed to achieve the running, warm geometry at that speed. Typically, a single hot-to-cold analysis is performed to generate the cold geometry needed for fabricating the hardware. The hot as-designed geometry is used to predict performance at all operating speeds. The present study shows that this approach tends to overpredict part-speed performance. The variation between the hot geometry and the warm geometry at part speeds below 80% of design speed was nearly one point in efficiency and more than 1.2% in total pressure ratio. The assumption of constant geometry is made due to the time-consuming and computationally expensive iterative procedure required to compute the warm part-speed geometries. To address this, a scaling is presented that allows for part-speed geometries to be determined using only the as-manufactured and as-designed geometries.
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