Date of Award

12-2007

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering

Department

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Dr. Magdy Attia

Committee Member

Dr. Eric Perrell

Committee Member

Dr. Vladimire Golubev

Abstract

Conducting full annulus experiments on multistage compressors is costly and time consuming due to the complexity of the experimental processes. To reduce complexity, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods are applied to turbomachinery and other applications in recent analysis of such cases. CFD methods are widely used within the aerospace industry and are increasingly demonstrating their reliability. For axial compressors, it is known that highly staggered compressor stators will increase the aerodynamic loading on the stator, which directly relates to the compressor stall and efficiency. In this work, compressor stators stagger angle is increased 4 ° to induce separation on the modified GE stator type B and mass flow is injected to eliminate this separation on the suction surface of the airfoil. Using airfoil geometry obtained from NASA, 2 different CFD codes; NASA's SWIFT and Gambit-FLUENT are employed to perform the analysis on the airfoil and to show the effectiveness of CFD. NASA's Codes, GRAPE and TCGRID are used to generate 2D and 3D mesh around the airfoil, and, to analyze the flow, RVCQ3d and SWIFT are employed for 2D and 3D cases, respectively, to detect separation on the Suction Surface of the stator. The commercial CFD code Gambit is used to generate mesh around a 3D airfoil and FLUENT is used to investigate the effectiveness of the flow control mechanism over the stator. Separation was successfully induced by restaggering the stators. Furthermore, it was successfully eliminated by injecting mass flow via slits on the suction surface.

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