Fatma Ceyhun Sahin had successfully defended her PhD thesis
Fatma Ceyhun Sahin had successfully defended her PhD thesis at the Université Catholique de Louvain in June 2014.
The title of the thesis is "Benefits of Flow Control on Compressor Blade Aerodynamics"
The present contribution focuses on losses through the stator section of a compressor stage. Preliminary numerical simulations on this blade profile showed that the secondary flows dominate the passage and will decrease the performance of the compressor dramatically. Low profile vortex generators which are selected with the aid of preliminary numerical simulations are included on the side walls of an experimental facility of a linear compressor cascade in order to reduce the secondary flow losses. Besides end-wall control, rib type VG’s on the blade suction surface are tested experimentally.
The effects of VG’s are first observed in the exit plane in terms of total pressure and velocity distributions, then for surface pressure distributions. The main parameters in selecting an optimum control case are defined as the loss in total pressure, flow turning, and boundary layer shape-factor. VG’s are promising when they are at a correct incidence angle inside the passage or at an optimized location upstream. The number of cases has to be increased to claim a quantitative database but since the cases were wisely selected according to the literature and the preliminary numerical results, a qualitative optimization is obtained for the defined stator blade. Simplified investigations on the results also provide some guidelines to generate a database for the future in the purpose of design rules definitions