An extension of the streamline curvature through-flow design method for bypass fans of turbofan engines

Abstract

The two-dimensional through-flow modeling of turbomachinery is still one of the most powerful tools available to the turbomachinery industry for aerodynamic design, analysis, and post-processing of test data due to its robustness and speed. Although variety of aspects of such a modeling approach are discussed in the publicly available literature for compressors and turbines, not much emphasis is placed on combined modeling of the fan and the downstream splitter of turbofan engines. The current article addresses this void by presenting a streamline curvature through-flow methodology that is suitable for inverse design for such a problem. A new split-flow method for the streamline solver, alternative to the publicly available analysis-oriented method, is implemented and initially compared with two-dimensional axisymmetric computational fluid dynamics on two representative geometries for high and low bypass ratios. The empirical models for incidence, deviation, loss, and end-wall blockage are compiled from the literature and calibrated against two test cases: experimental data of NASA two-stage fan and three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics of a custom-designed transonic fan stage. Finally, experimental validation against GE-NASA bypass fan case is accomplished to validate the complete methodology. The proposed method is a simple extension of streamline curvature method and can be applied to existing compressor methodologies with minimum numerical effort.