No abstract

Active flow control methods are commonly used in expanding the operating range of compressors. Indeed, unsteady active control methods are the main focus of researchers due to their effectiveness. For constructing an unsteady active control system, reliable actuators are significant. To compare with conventional actuators such as synthetic jet actuators and rotating valves, fluidic oscillators have structurally robust characteristics and can generate self-excited and self-sustained oscillating jets, which leads to its higher applicability in compressors under severe working conditions. Thus, to explore the feasibility of unsteady active control systems by the usage of fluidic oscillators, a low-frequency and low-speed oscillator is first designed and experimentally studied for improving the stability of a low-speed axial flow compressor. During the experiments, a special casing is designed to install 15 uniformly distributed oscillators in the tip region of compressor. Based on the unsteady micro injections of the rotor tip with rotor rotation frequency, the results indicate that the frequency/period of oscillators are flexible, in which the values are decoupled with the variation of inlet pressure. When the inlet-to-outlet pressure ratio of the oscillator is in the range of 1.1~2.0, the maximum velocity ranges from 30 m/s to 80 m/s. Moreover, the mass flow rate of the single oscillator only varies from 0.017‰ to 0.059‰ from the designed compressor mass flow rate. For the improvement of the compressor stall margin, the value is 3.45% when the total mass flow of oscillators is 0.08% of the designed compressor mass flow.

No abstract

No abstract

For fans of a variable-cycle engine, a good aerodynamic performance over a wide range of rotating speeds is essential. However, when supersonic cascades designed for a high upstream Mach number operate under a low upstream Mach number, a starting problem may occur, which significantly decreases the aerodynamic performance of fan blades. As a result, the operating range of the supersonic cascades is severely limited. To solve the starting problem caused by the mismatch between geometry of supersonic cascades and upstream Mach number, a morphing supersonic cascade is developed. Thus, this study mainly focuses on the effect of the static deformation of supersonic cascades driven by smart materials on aerodynamic characteristics under a low upstream Mach number. To investigate this issue, numerous simulations are conducted on an S-type cascade by finite element method and computational fluid dynamics. As demonstrated by flow structure analysis, the morphing cascades are started under certain morphing configurations while the original cascade operates at nonstarted state. The results show that the deformation driven by smart materials alters the shock wave structures under a low upstream Mach number by adjusting key cascade geometric parameters. Specifically, the morphing cascades achieve 80% reduction of detached shock loss compared with the original cascades.