Separation in compressor cascade triggers flow loss and instability. This paper presents a passive flow control method by introducing a slot into the blade. The slot induces self-adapted jet, while the jet flow is used to suppress cascade’s separation. To study the flow control effect, experiments were conducted and flow field details were given by validated numerical simulations. The results show that a well-designed slot carries adequate jet airflow from pressure side (PS) to suction side (SS) due to the great pressure fall between the two sides. The jet airflow delays suction side separation within specific incidence angles, so the performance of cascade achieves considerable improvements. It enables to be concluded that the slot carries jet flow to SS separation zone, and then the self-adapted jet flow re-energizes low momentum fluid and suppresses vortices in the separation which are negative to the cascade flow.

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The compressor cascade performance is significantly restricted by the secondary flow mainly presented as the trailing edge separation and corner stall. This paper develops a synthetic flow control approach in a high turning cascade using the vortex generator and slot jet approach. Numerical simulations were conducted to assess the flow control benefits and illustrate the flow control mechanisms. Four configurations, the baseline, the two individual approaches and the synthetic approach, were simulated to compare the separation control effects. The simulations show that all the three configurations achieve considerable improvements of the cascade performance and the cascade sensitivity to incidence angle is greatly decreased. The synthetic approach improves the most among them which is almost the superposition of the two individual ones. In the synthetic approach, the trailing vortex induced by the vortex generator suppresses the end wall cross flow and deflects the passage vortex, and then prevents the production of corner stall; at the same time, the slot jet speeds up the trailing edge separation caused by the cascade high camber. Owing to the combination of the two aspects, the synthetic approach restricts the developments of secondary flow and vortices in the cascade, and improves the outflow uniformity. The synthetic approach nicely utilizes the advantages of the two individual approach while avoids the shortages by the complementation, so it can achieve more powerful flow control effects. At the end, vortices models are established to illustrate the secondary flow structure and the flow control mechanisms.