A numerical strategy for modelling rotating stall in core compressors

The paper will focus on one specific core-compressor instability, rotating stall, because of the pressing industrial need to improve current design methods. The determination of the blade response during rotating stall is a difficult problem for which there is no reliable procedure. During rotating stall, the blades encounter the stall cells and the excitation depends on the number, size, exact shape and rotational speed of these cells. The long-term aim is to minimize the forced response due to rotating stall excitation by avoiding potential matches between the vibration modes and the rotating stall pattern characteristics. Accurate numerical simulations of core-compressor rotating stall phenomena require the modelling of a large number of bladerows using grids containing several tens of millions of points. The time-accurate unsteady-flow computations may need to be run for several engine revolutions for rotating stall to get initiated and many more before it is fully developed. The difficulty in rotating stall initiation arises from a lack of representation of the triggering disturbances which are inherently present in aeroengines. Since the numerical model represents a symmetric assembly, the only random mechanism for rotating stall initiation is provided by numerical round-off errors. In this work, rotating stall is initiated by introducing a small amount of geometric mistuning to the rotor blades. Another major obstacle in modelling flows near stall is the specification of appropriate upstream and downstream boundary conditions. Obtaining reliable boundary conditions for such flows can be very difficult. In the present study, the low-pressure compression (LPC) domain is placed upstream of the core compressor. With such an approach, only far field atmospheric boundary conditions are specified which are obtained from aircraft speed and altitude. A chocked variable-area nozzle, placed after the last compressor bladerow in the model, is used to impose boundary conditions downstream. Such an approach is representative of modelling an engine. Using a 3D viscous time-accurate flow representation, the front bladerows of a core compressor were modelled in a whole-annulus fashion whereas the rest of bladerows are modelled in a single-passage fashion. The rotating stall behaviour at two different compressor operating points was studied by considering two different variable-vane scheduling conditions for which experimental data were available. Using a model with nine whole-assembly models, the unsteady-flow calculations were conducted on 32-CPUs of a parallel cluster, typical run times being around 3-4 weeks for a grid with about 60 million points. The simulations were conducted over several engine rotations. As observed on the actual development engine, there was no rotating stall for the first scheduling condition while mal-scheduling of the stator vanes created a 12-band rotating stall which excited the 1st flap mode. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.