Experimental investigation of rapid flow transients in an inlet/compressor system, induced by short-duration acoustic and entropy disturbances

Highly sophisticated and extensively tested computational fluid dynamics codes are available to simulate the operation of inlet and compressor systems in high-speed airbreathing propulsion devices. In contrast, the methods used to couple these codes during the simulation of an unsteady flow transient are in a significantly less advanced state. In engineering practice the computations are typically performed separately for each device, while representing the adjacent component through a boundary condition. Unfortunately, the lack of experimentally validated compressor face boundary conditions leaves the accuracy of these models open to doubt. From the viewpoint of inlet computations, the compressor face boundary condition amounts to an approximate description of the manner in which upstream moving acoustic waves are induced by the arrival of downstream moving acoustic and entropy (temperature) disturbances to the compressor.; This dissertation presents the results of an experimental investigation involving such rapid flow transients in a facility that combined a constant area circular inlet with a single-stage axial-flow compressor. Inlet Mach numbers ranged from 0.15 to 0.45. The experiment employed an impulse method, in which short-duration, large amplitude acoustic and entropy pulses were generated within the inlet utilizing an exploding wire technique. The incident acoustic pulse, its reflection from the compressor and the acoustic wave transmitted across the compressor were tracked by fast response pressure transducers, while entropy pulses were detected by dual-element hotfilm probes. Frequency domain analysis of the data yielded transfer functions that may be thought of as non-dimensional frequency-resolved reflection, transmission and induction coefficients. Transfer functions have been demonstrated to be suitable for the prediction of transients induced by small amplitude, incident acoustic and entropy pulses, thereby representing a powerful method for extending the results of the single experiment to a wide array of situations. The experimental results show that the amplitudes of both the reflections, and the upstream-moving acoustic waves induced by the incident entropy waves, increase with increasing axial Mach numbers. None of the currently customary compressor-face boundary conditions can predict the data obtained in this study, strongly suggesting that conventional practices concerning outflow boundary conditions during unsteady flow transients are in need of reassessment.