Investigation on Multiple Cylindrical Holes Casing Treatment for Transonic Axial Compressor Stability Enhancement

Casing treatment is one possible way of regaining axial compressor operating range. However, most of casing treatments extend the operating range with the cost of efficiency penalty. A new form of multiple cylindrical holes casing treatment(MHCT) with pre-swirl blowing for the NASA Rotor-37 has been designed based on profound understanding of the stall inception. Unsteady numerical simulations have been performed for Rotor-37 with and without MHCT. Parametric studies of the total extraction holes area and their axial locations show that the compressor performance deteriorates as the area ratio increases but the stall margin is extended and there is an optimum extraction holes axial location for stall margin extending. The better configuration of MHCT could extend the stall margin by 6.2% with only 0.23% peak efficiency reduction. Detailed analysis of the physical mechanism behind the stall margin improvement shows that the casing treatment could eliminate the passage blockage by suppressing breakup of tip leakage vortex and decrease the blade load in tip region, which both contribute to improve stall margin of transonic axial compressors.