Impact of inlet flow angle variation on the performance of a transonic compressor blade using NIPC

The impact of inlet flow variations on turbomachines is common in the real world, resulting in undesirable performance deteriorations in engineering. The origin of performance changes and how to evaluate the changes require to be investigated. On use of a polynomial chaos based surrogate model method and Monte Carlo simulation (MCS), performance impact considering the stochastic variations of the inlet flow angle for a transonic compressor rotor blade is studied, and the impact mechanisms are investigated by MCS-based statistical flow analysis. A detailed grid-independent study assisted by Richardson extrapolation is first presented to illustrate the reliability of numerical solutions. Then, the implementations of non-intrusive polynomial chaos employing an adaptive sparse grid are introduced. Uncertainty quantifications of adiabatic efficiency and mass flow rate changes of NASA Rotor 67 are achieved, and the effects of different distributions of inlet flow angle variation (IFAV) and different ranges of IFAV on the performance changes under different operation conditions are investigated. Finally, statistical analysis of flow solutions is performed by MCS. The spanwise distributions of the changes in adiabatic efficiency and mass flow rate at the outlet are presented. Moreover, the flow solutions on the blade-to-blade stream surfaces at different spans are statistically analyzed, and discussions are given to demonstrate the impact mechanisms of IFAV on performance changes. (C) 2022 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).