EXPERIMENTS ON TUNED UHBR OPEN-TEST-CASE FAN ECL5/CATANA: PERFORMANCE AND AERODYNAMICS

Abstract

Abstract With the advancement of modern fan architectures the lack of experimental benchmarks for the research community became apparent in recent years. Enormous effort in method development could not be validated on representative geometries and motivated the development of the open-test-case ECL5/CATANA. A carbon fibre fan stage has been designed by Ecole Centrale de Lyon and shared with the community in 2021. The fan is representative of modern UHBR architectures with sonic design speed. The reference configuration has been investigated experimentally with multi-physical instrumentation. In this publication the results of the first experimental campaign are presented with a detailed analysis of the aerodynamic performance and system symmetry. The presented results comprise full stage mappings across the whole operating range for three main speedlines (55%, 80% and 100%) using performance rakes, unsteady wallpressure arrays, tip-clearance and stagger-angle measurements. Radial profiles of intake boundary layer and rotor-exit conditions at selected conditions complete the full validation dataset for steady and unsteady aerodynamic simulations. Results are discussed in comparison to blind-test RANS simulations of different international institutes. Significant predicition inaccuracies of the tip flow and corner separations of the stator are observed and reveal the requirement of real-blade-geometry measurements at running conditions. This paper is accompanied by a publication with a focus on aeroelastic instabilities observed near the stability limit. The results represent a comprehensive dimensional benchmark dataset and allow method validation on multiple levels of fidelity for the aerodynamic and aeroelastic research community.