Partial tip air injection to extend the stall margin in an axial flow compressor with circumferential inlet distortion

As a typical non-axisymmetric inflow, circumferential pressure inlet distortion was experimentally investigated in an axial flow compressor. Based on the obvious decreasing trend of stall margin with the enhancement of distorted intensity, the stall mechanism under the condition of maximum distorted intensity, namely, 24.57 %, was studied in detailed. The casing static pressure over the rotor blade tip along the chord and circumferential direction were measured using a collection of dynamic transducers. Results show that under the circumferential inlet distortion condition, the pressure disturbance is always generated downstream from the distorted region along the rotational direction, and circumferentially propagates until it disappears in the upstream of the distorted region. With the continuous throttling, if the pressure disturbance that has not completely disappeared in the undistorted region enters the distorted region again, its energy will be enhanced, finally induces the stall. Using the above understanding as a foundation to apply partial tip air injection to suppress the disturbance caused by the circumferential inlet distortion, and resist its adverse effect on stall margin to ensure the safe operation of the compressor. It demonstrated that the tip air injection applied in the downstream of the distorted region can obtained the largest stall margin on the premise of the same injected momentum. For the strongest distortion case (DC (60) equals to 24.57 %), the injectors fixed downstream the distorted region can reduce the number and scale of the spike disturbances, suppress the local tip leakage vortex, and decrease the amplitude of the pressure disturbance energy, thus a maximum stall margin improvement of 3.18 % is obtained. However, tip air injection in the undistorted region cannot contribute the stall margin improvement that it leads to stronger tip leakage vortex and earlier stall inception. This study provides a guideline to design the non-axisymmetric tip air injection for circumferential inlet distortion with a help of injected mass flow and energy reduction.