The Effect of Variable Stator on Performance of a Highly Loaded Tandem Axial Flow Compressor Stage

Increasing the aerodynamic load on compressor blades helps to obtain a higher pressure ratio in lower rotational speeds. Considering the high aerodynamic load effects and structural concerns in the design process, it is possible to obtain higher pressure ratios compared to conventional compressors. However, it must be noted that imposing higher aerodynamic loads results in higher loss coemcients and deteriorates the overall performance. To avoid the loss increase, the boundary layer quality must be studied carefully over the blade suction surface. Employment of advanced shaped airfoils （like CDAs）, slotted blades or other boundary layer control methods has helped the de- signers to use higher aerodynamic loads on compressor blades. Tandem cascade is a passive boundary layer control method, which is based on using the flow momentum to control the boundary layer on the suction surface and also to avoid the probable separation caused by higher aerodynamic loads. In fact, the front pressure side flow momentum helps to compensate the positive pressure gradient over the aft blade＇s suction side. Also, in compari- son to the single blade stators, tandem variable stators have more degrees of freedom, and this issue increases the possibility of finding enhanced conditions in the compressor off-design performance. In the current study, a 3D design procedure for an axial flow tandem compressor stage has been applied to design a highly loaded stage. Following, this design is numerically investigated using a CFD code and the stage characteristic map is reported. Also, the effect of various stator stagger angles on the compressor performance and especially on the compressor surge margin has been discussed. To validate the CFD method, another known compressor stage is presented and its performance is numerically investigated and the results are compared with available experimental results.

Exergetic Performance Analysis of a Cogeneration Plant at Part Load Operations

A cogeneration plant can run at off-design due to change of load demand or ambient conditions. The cogeneration considered for this study is gas turbine based engine consists of variable stator vanes （VSVs） compressor that are re-staggered for loads greater than 50% to maintain the gas turbine exhaust gas temperature at the set value. In order to evaluate the exergetic performance of the cogeneration, exergy model of each cogeneration component is formulated. A 4.2 MW gas turbine based cogeneration plant is analysed for a wide range of part load operations including the effect of VSVs modulation. For loads less than 50%, the major exergy destruction contributors are the combustor and the loss with the stack gas. At full load, the exergy destructions in the combustor, turbine, heat recovery, compressor and the exergy loss with stack gas are 63.7, 14.1, 11.5, 5.7, and 4.9%, respectively. The corresponding first and second law cogeneration efficiencies are 78.5 and 45%, respectively. For comparison purpose both the first and second law efticiencies of each component are represented together. This analysis would help to identify the equipment where the potential for performance improvement is high, and trends which may aid in the design of future plants.

Numerical Investigation of Base-Setting of Stator's Stagger Angles for a 15-stage Axial-Flow Compressor

A 15-stage axial-flow compressor utilized in steel industry was studied in this paper. All the stator's stagger angles of the compressor are variable to ensure the multistage compressor operate effectively within a wide range of flow rate and meanwhile satisfy the demand for sufficient pressure ratio, adiabatic efficiency and stall margin. Three in all different base-settings of stator's stagger angles were presented and commercial CFD software was applied to obtain the overall performance characteristics. The results showed that both of the optimized base-settings improved the performances both in summer and winter conditions, although the adiabatic efficiency was somewhat decreased. Taking incidence angle and stage loading into consideration, differences among the three cases were analyzed in detail. On the basis of numerical computations, the performance could be effectively improved through adjusting the base-setting of stator's stagger angles.

Stator re-stagger optimization in multistage axial compressor

As a widely applied technique in multistage axial compressors,variable stator vanes(VSV)can flexibly rematch the blade rows to fulfil a variety of aerodynamic performance requirements,such as high efficiency and wide surge margin.The purpose of this paper is to develop an optimization method to quickly determine VSV settings during the preliminary design phase.A mean-line method with a model calibration procedure is adopted to evaluate compressor performance,and the NSGA-II algorithm is employed for automatic optimization.The developed optimization system is then employed to determined re-stagger arrangement in a multistage compressor.A single-speed optimization with performance constraints of specific operating point and a multi-speed optimization with different control laws are conducted.Results are compared with available experimental re-stagger scheme,which verifies the effectiveness of the re-stagger optimization method.Moreover,method is proposed to determine operating parameters of a working point with a user-defined pressure ratio or mass flow rate after variable geometry.