Off-Design Compressor Performance Estimation of Axial Multi-Stage Compressors

Alexander Joerger, Dr. Yu Wan

Advisors: Prof. ZS Spakovszky, Prof. EM Greitzer

Fast response of industrial gas turbines in power production has become necessary due to more frequent and rapid shut-downs and start-ups resulting from the increased use of renewable energy. Fast response means that modern power gas turbines have to reach full load within a few minutes. As solar and wind energy do not provide a constant power supply, power gas turbines are needed to fill the gaps in energy availability. Fast response operation imposes new design requirements on compressors and poses a challenge for industrial gas turbine manufacturers.
The turn-around of compressor designs has to be on the order of minutes to enable exploration of the design space and performance optimization during preliminary design. This turn-around is currently incompatible with three-dimensional multi-stage CFD computations, and lower fidelity approaches are used instead.
This research aims to establish an off-design compressor estimation framework that combines an actuator disk model with flow information extracted from three-dimensional CFD. This new framework will augment an existing compressor design process and enable design optimization accounting for both on-design and off-design performance.