Influence of SPS casing treatment on axial flow compressor subjected to radial pressure distortion

The present work is about the stall margin enhancement ability of a kind of stall precursor-suppressed（SPS） casing treatment when fan/compressor suffers from a radial total pressure inlet distortion.Experimental researches are conducted on a low-speed compressor with and without SPS casing treatment under radial distorted inlet flow of different levels as well as uniform inlet flow.The distorted flow fields of different levels are generated by annular distortion flow generators of different heights.The characteristic curves under these conditions are measured and analyzed.The results show that the radial inlet distortion could cause a stall margin loss from 2%to30%under different distorted levels.The SPS casing treatment could remedy this stall margin loss under small distortion level and only partly make up the stall margin loss caused by distortion in large level without leading to perceptible additional efficiency loss and obvious change of characteristic curves.The pre-stall behavior of the compressor is investigated to reveal the mechanism of this stall margin improvement ability of the SPS casing treatment.The results do show that this casing treatment delays the occurrence of rotating stall by weakening the pressure perturbations and suppressing the nonlinear amplification of the stall precursor waves in the compression system.

Experimental investigation on SPS casing treatment with bias flow

Generally, casing treatment（CT） is a passivity method to enhance the stall margin of fan/compressor. A novel casing treatment based on the small disturbance theory and vortex and wave interaction suggestion is a method combining passive control and active control, which has been proved effective at enhancing the stall margin of fan/compressor in experiment. In order to investigate the mechanism of this kind of casing treatment, an experimental investigation of a stall precursor-suppressed（SPS） casing treatment with air suction or blowing air is conducted in the present paper. The SPS casing treatment is designed to suppressing stall precursors to realize stall margin enhancement in turbomachinery. The experimental results show that the casing treatment with blowing air of small quantity can improve the stall margin by about 8% with about 1% efficiency loss. By contrast, the SPS casing treatment with micro-bias flow does not improve the stall margin much more than that without bias flow, even worse. Meanwhile, the present investigation has also attempted to reveal the mechanism of stall margin improvement with the casing treatment.It is found that the stall margin improvements vary with the modification of the unsteady shedding flow and the unsteady wall boundary impedance. The experimental results agree fairly well with the theoretical prediction using a flow stability model of rotating stall.