A new approach of casing treatment design for high speed compressors running at partial speeds with low speed large scale test

The instability problems tend to be more severe when high speed compressors operate at partial speeds. This paper proposes an economic approach for casing treatment design that suitable to this situation. Aiming at reducing the expensive and time-consuming high-speed casing treatment experiments, the idea of low-speed similitude of high-speed compressors, which was originally practiced in mid-1980 with the purpose of loss reduction, is now extended to simulate the stability enhancement with casing treatment in this paper. The core idea of this approach is to replace a large portion of design processes for the high-speed compressors (the Prototype) with their equivalent large scale model compressors (the Model). Two different transonic rotors with skewed slots and circumferential grooves casing treatments are conducted as examples to demonstrate this approach. Following the selected similarity rules, the Model is firstly acquired by modeling the near stall point of the Prototype. A variety of casing treatments are designed and assessed on the Model. Then a few more promising configurations can thus be selected via low speed experiments. They are believed to have similar tendency on stall margin improvement on the Prototype. Finally, the selected configurations are converted back to the Prototype with based on the rule of similarity and validated by experimental data. In this paper, principles that guarantee the similitude of the flow field at near stall condition and the effectiveness of the casing treatment are discussed.