Investigation of Loss Generation in an Embedded Transonic Fan Stage at Several Gaps Using High-Fidelity, Time-Accurate Computational Fluid Dynamics

The blade-row interaction (BRI) rig at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Compressor Aero Research Laboratory, has been simulated at three axial gaps between the highly loaded upstream stator row and the downstream transonic rotor using TURBO. Previous work with the stage matching investigation (SMI) demonstrated a strong dependence of mass flow rate, efficiency, and pressure ratio on the axial spacing between an upstream wake generator and the downstream rotor through the variation of the axial gap. Several loss producing mechanisms were discovered and related to the spacings, referred to as close, mid, and far. In the SMI work, far spacing had the best performance. The BRI experiments were a continuation of the SMI work with the wake generator replaced with a swirler row to turn the flow and a deswirler row to create a wake by diffusion. Results of the BRI experiments showed a performance degradation between mid- and far spacings, which was not observed in SMI. This trend is seen in the numerical work as well, and the time-averaged data show that the majority of this performance change occurred in the rotor. An unsteady separation bubble periodically forms and collapses as shocks reflect through the stator passage, creating additional aerodynamic blockage. The shed vortices induced by the unsteady loading and unloading of the stator trailing edge are chopped, with a frequency related to the spacing, by the rotor leading edge and ingested by the rotor. Once ingested the vortices interact in varying degrees with the rotor boundary layer. A treatment of the loss production in the BRI rig is given based on the time-accurate and time-averaged, high-fidelity TURBO results.