Active Suppression of Rotating Stall and Surge in Axial Compressors

This paper reports on an experimental program in which active control was successfully applied to both rotating stall and surge in a multistage compressor. Two distinctly different methods were used to delay the onset of rotating stall in a four-stage compressor using fast-acting air injection valves. The amount of air injected was small compared to the machine mass flow, the maximum being less than 1.0 percent. In some compressor configurations modal perturbations were observed prior to stall. By using the air injection valves to damp out these perturbations, an improvement of about 4.0 percent in stall margin was achieved. The second method of stall suppression was to remove emerging stall cells by injecting air in their immediate vicinity. Doing this repeatedly delayed the onset of stall, giving a stall margin improvement of about 6.0 percent. Further studies were conducted using a large plenum downstream of the compressor to induce the system to surge rather than stall. The resulting surge cycles were all found to be initiated by rotating stall and therefore the stall suppression systems mentioned above could also be used to suppress surge. In addition, it was possible to arrest the cyclical pulsing of a compressor already in surge.