Influence of SPS casing treatment on axial flow compressor subjected to radial pressure distortion

The present work is about the stall margin enhancement ability of a kind of stall precursor-suppressed (SPS) casing treatment when fan/compressor suffers from a radial total pressure inlet distortion. Experimental researches are conducted on a low-speed compressor with and without SPS casing treatment under radial distorted inlet flow of different levels as well as uniform inlet flow. The distorted flow fields of different levels are generated by annular distortion flow generators of different heights. The characteristic curves under these conditions are measured and analyzed. The results show that the radial inlet distortion could cause a stall margin loss from 2% to 30% under different distorted levels. The SPS casing treatment could remedy this stall margin loss under small distortion level and only partly make up the stall margin loss caused by distortion in large level without leading to perceptible additional efficiency loss and obvious change of characteristic curves. The pre-stall behavior of the compressor is investigated to reveal the mechanism of this stall margin improvement ability of the SPS casing treatment. The results do show that this casing treatment delays the occurrence of rotating stall by weakening the pressure perturbations and suppressing the nonlinear amplification of the stall precursor waves in the compression system.