The present paper numerically investigates the stall inception mechanisms in a centrifugal compressor stage composed of a splittered unshrouded impeller and a vaned diffuser. Unsteady numerical simulations have been conducted on a calculation domain comprising all the blade passages over 360 deg for the impeller and the diffuser. Three stable operating points are simulated along a speed line, and the full path to instability is investigated. The paper focusses first on the effects of the mass flow reduction on the flow topology at the inlet of both components. Then, a detailed analysis of stall inception mechanisms is proposed. It is shown that at the inlet of both components, the mass flow reduction induces boundary layer separation on the blade suction side, which results in a vortex tube having its upper end at the casing and its lower end at the blade wall. Some similarities with flows in axial compressor operating at stall condition are outlined. The stall inception process starts with the growth of the amplitude of a modal wave rotating in the vaneless space. As the flow in the compressor is subsonic, the wave propagates upstream and interacts with the impeller flow structure. This interaction leads to the drop in the impeller pressure ratio.

The present work details the occurrence of the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability in a centrifugal compressor operating near stall. The analysis is based on unsteady three-dimensional simulations performed on a calculation domain covering the full annulus for the impeller and the vaned diffuser. A detailed investigation of the flow structure is presented, together with its evolution consequent to the mass flow reduction. It is demonstrated that this reduction leads to an enlargement of the low-momentum flow region initially induced by the combination of the secondary and leakage flows. When the compressor operates near stall, the shear layer at the interface between the main flow and this low-momentum flow becomes unstable and induces a periodic vortex shedding. The frequency of such an unsteady phenomenon is not correlated with the blade-passing frequency. Its signature is thus easily isolated from the deterministic rotor/stator interaction. Its detection requires full-annulus simulations with an accurate resolution in time and space, which explains why it has never been previously observed in centrifugal compressors.

A detailed study of the air flow through the fan stage of a high-bypass, geared turbofan in windmilling conditions is proposed, to address the key performance issues of this severe case of off-design operation. Experiments are conducted in the turbofan test rig of ISAE, specifically suited to reproduce windmilling operation in an ambient ground setup. The engine is equipped with conventional measurements and radial profiles of flow quantities are measured using directional five-hole probes to characterize the flow across the fan stage and derive windmilling performance parameters. These results bring experimental evidence of the findings of the literature that both the fan rotor and stator operate under severe off-design angle-of-attack, leading to flow separation and stagnation pressure loss. The fan rotor operates in a mixed fashion: spanwise, the inner sections of the rotor blades add work to the flow while the outer sections extract work and generate a pressure loss. The overall work is negative, revealing the resistive loads on the fan, caused by the bearing friction and work exchange in the different components of the fan shaft. The parametric study shows that the fan rotational speed is proportional to the mass flow rate, but the fan rotor inlet and outlet relative flow angles, as well as the fan load profile, remain constant, for different values of mass flow rate. Estimations of engine bypass ratio have been done, yielding values higher than six times the design value. The comprehensive database that was built will allow the validation of 3D Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations to provide a better understanding of the internal losses in windmilling conditions.

New propulsive concepts, such as boundary layer ingestion, involve stronger interactions between the engine and its environment, and are thus more complex flows compared to classical architectures. Usual turbomachinery design tools are inadequate, and new numerical methodologies are needed to accurately predict the engine performance with affordable CPU resources. The present paper examines the relevance of a reduced-order modeling approach—the body force modeling (BFM) method—for a low-speed cooling fan with inflow distortion. The formulation itself accounts for the blade metal blockage and compressibility effects, and it relies on a semiempirical loss model, independent of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calibration. The BFM results obtained in the present work are assessed against full-annulus unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) results and experiments. The comparison shows that the BFM approach successfully quantifies the fan stage performance. Furthermore, the distortion transfer across the stage is examined and the flow patterns observed are found to be the same as in the URANS results and in the measurements. Hence, this methodology, coming at a low CPU cost, is well-adapted to the early design phase of an innovative propulsion system.

With the advent of high bypass ratio turbofan engines of increasing size, new nacelle designs with shorter air intakes have to be considered, creating new aerodynamic interactions with the fan. This paper focuses on a numerical strategy known as Body Force Modeling, in which engine components are modeled and taken into account using source terms in the RANS equation. This approach allows to simulate these interactions with an accuracy comparable to full 360° unsteady simulations, but at a fraction of the cost. Different formulations for the body forces are proposed and applied to different nacelle test cases of varying intake length. Using full annulus unsteady computations as validation data, it is shown that the body force approach allows to capture inlet design effects on in-plane forces and on nacelle flow separation.

In the present study, the flow through the fan stage of a high bypass ratio turbofan at windmill is studied numerically. First, steady mixing plane simulations are validated against detailed experimental engine test-bed measurements, at several locations within the fan stage and close to the core/bypass flow splitter. Good agreement between the numerical and experimental results is obtained for the global operating point in the fan map. For the two windmilling points considered, it appears that as the flight Mach number is reduced, the windmilling operating point moves closer to the stability limit of the fan. For the radial profiles, good agreement is found downstream of the rotor. Downstream of the stator, it is shown that the steady approach fails to reproduce some important feature of the flow. A local flow analysis is proposed, evidencing several characteristics of the flow in windmilling: in the rotor, the size of the separation zone is found to increase from hub to tip, due to a solidity effect. In the stator, massive flow separation occurs at mid-span, which leads to the formation of two streamwise counter-rotating vortices. Then, the nonlinear harmonic method is applied to a section (at 70% of the relative span) of the fan stage. A modal analysis is performed, showing a specific behavior at windmill: the massively separated flows in the rotor and the stator entail strong rotor/stator interaction modes. Finally, the unsteady flow pattern is examined: the velocity defect of the rotor wake, which periodically increases the flow angle on the stator, is shown to trigger a periodic movement of the reattachment point at the trailing edge of the stator, associated with vortex shedding from the lower side of the vane. The implication of this qualitative flow behavior on the method to extract computational fluid dynamics results for comparisons with experiments is discussed.