A new transonic compressor test rig for gas turbine front stages was commissioned at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2018. In the first measurement campaign numerous transient stall maneuvers were conducted by throttling the compressor beyond its stability limit. Several distinct phenomena can be observed during in-stall operation. This work gives an overview of those different manifestations of stall with focus on classification and characterization. For this purpose, detailed post-processing and unsteady data analysis are conducted providing information in terms of operating points, propagation speeds of disturbances, structural behavior of the rotor as well as unsteady wall pressure fields. The authors propose explanations for the different phenomena and possible influences of the rig on the in-stall behavior are discussed. Finally, an overview of the occurrence of the detected phenomena is given.

The loss coefficient based only on the stagnation pressure has traditionally been used in the analysis of axial compressors for the comparison between shrouded and cantilevered stator configurations. In recent years, engineers have been able to perform more detailed Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations, allowing them to resolve the flow field in the leakage paths. The two stator hub designs are, however, affected by the rotating surfaces in a different way: in cantilevered stators, the relative rotation between the stator and the hub imparts energy to the hub flow, whereas in shrouded stators, the rotating inner leakage surface imparts energy to the seal cavity leakage flow. The aim of this work is to analyze the performance of a multi-stage axial compressor featuring a change of stator hub configuration, by employing both the conventional loss coefficient based on the stagnation pressure and the loss coefficient based on the entropy change. It is shown, that in the evaluation of the losses of a multi-stage axial machine, it is essential to consider the different 3D distributions of stagnation temperature resulting from the two stator hub configurations, which are transferred to the downstream rows.

In contrast to external flow aerodynamics, where one-dimensional Riemann boundary conditions can be applied far up- and downstream, the handling of non-reflecting boundary conditions for turbomachinery applications poses a greater challenge due to small axial gaps normally encountered. For boundaries exposed to non-uniform flow in the vicinity of blade rows, the quality of the simulation is greatly influenced by the underlying non-reflecting boundary condition and its implementation. This paper deals with the adaptation of Giles’ well-known exact non-local boundary conditions for two-dimensional steady flows to a cell-centered solver specifically developed for turbomachinery applications. It is shown that directly applying the theory originally formulated for a cell-vertex scheme to a cell-centered solver may yield an ill-posed problem due to the necessity of having to reconstruct boundary face values before actually applying the exact non-reflecting theory. In order to ensure well-posedness, Giles’ original approach is adapted for cell-centered schemes with a physically motivated reconstruction of the boundary face values, while still maintaining the non-reflecting boundary conditions. The extension is formulated within the original framework of determining the circumferential distribution of one-dimensional characteristics on the boundary. It is shown that, due to approximations in the one-dimensional characteristic reconstruction of boundary face values, the new approach can only be exact in the limiting case of cells with a vanishing width in the direction normal to the boundary if a one-dimensional characteristic reconstruction of boundary face values is used. To overcome the dependency on the width of the last cell, the new boundary condition is expressed explicitly in terms of a two-dimensional modal decomposition of the flow field. In this formulation, vanishing modal amplitudes for all incoming two-dimensional modes can easily be accomplished for a converged solution. Hence we are able to ensure perfectly non-reflecting boundary conditions under the same conditions as the original approach. The improvements of the new method are demonstrated for both a subsonic turbine and a transonic compressor test case.