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Optimization of a stator blade using response surface method in a single-stage transonic axial compressor
C-M Jang1 and K-Y Kim2 1 Fire and Engineering Services Research Department, Korea Institute of Construction Technology, Daehwa-dong, Goyang-Si, Republic of Korea 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Inha University, Nam-Gu, Incheon, Republic of Korea The manuscript was received on 11 October 2004 and was accepted after revision for publication on 8 July 2005. DOI: 10.1243/095765005X31298

Abstract: This article describes the shape optimization of a stator blade in a single-stage transonic axial compressor. The blade optimization has been performed using response surface method and three-dimensional Navier Stokes analysis. Thin-layer approximation is introduced to the Navier Stokes equations, and an explicit Runge Kutta scheme is used to solve the governing equations. Two geometric design variables of the stator blade, which are used to dene a stacking line, are introduced to increase an adiabatic efciency. D-optimal design is employed to reduce the number of evaluation points for response surface. With the optimization of the stator blade, the adiabatic efciency is successfully improved when compared with that of the reference shape of the stator with straight stacking line. Positive stacking line, which bends on blade pressure side, effectively suppresses the ow separation on the blade suction surface of the stator. Keywords: transonic axial compressor, optimal design, stacking line, adiabatic efciency

INTRODUCTION

The present study is focused on the shape optimization of a stator blade in a single-stage transonic axial compressor. The shape optimization based on three-dimensional ow analysis has been performed in the design process of turbomachinery blades in recent years as an efcient tool to increase the stage efciency. The ow inside a transonic axial compressor has extremely complex features because of its three-dimensional, unsteady, and vortical nature [1 5]. This makes it difcult to predict accurately the compressor performance by numerical simulation. Most CFD-based designs of the transonic axial compressors are done in a trial-and-error approach in which the design process is guided by the designers expertise. However, in the design process, numerical optimization technique provides means for performing a rational and systematic search to nd a design with improved performance.

Corresponding author: Department of Mechanical Engineering,

Inha University, 253 Yonghyun-Dong, Nam-Gu, Incheon, 402-751, Republic of Korea.

Recently, the leaned, swept, and skewed blade has become a matter of interest in the design of turbomachinery blades. Watanabe and Zangeneh [5] reported that the blade sweep in the design of a transonic turbomachinery is an effective parameter to control the strength and position of the shock wave at the tip of the transonic rotors and to control the corner separation in the stator. Denton and Xu [6] investigated the effects of sweep and lean on the performance of a transonic fan. They showed that the stall margin was signicantly improved with the forward-swept blade, although a very little change in peak efciency was produced by blade sweep or lean. Fischer et al. [7] showed the effect of bowed stators on the performance of a four-stage high speed compressor. They observed that the separation was reduced in the bowed stator, leading to increase in the stagnation pressure ratio and efciency. Numerical optimizations using three-dimensional RANS analysis have been applied to the shape design of turbomachinery in the last decade. The majority of the effort in design optimization of aerodynamics has relied on a gradient-based optimization method [8, 9]. The method works iteratively through a sequence of local subproblems, which approximate

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objective and constraint functions for a subregion of the design space. However, it is known that the gradient-based optimization method is apt to fail into a local minimum. In contrast, response surface method (RSM) [10], as a global optimization method, is recently introduced as a tool of design optimization for turbomachinery. The RSM has many advantages over gradient-based methods [10, 11]. This method smoothes out high frequency noise of the objective function, thus is expected to nd a solution near the global optimum [11]. The method does not require calculation of the local sensitivity of each design variable and is able to perform tasks in parallel easily. The RSM can utilize information collected from various sources and by different tools. Thus, this method is effective for both the single- and multi-disciplinary optimization problems [12]. Ahn and Kim [13] used RSM for the design optimization of axial compressor rotor blades. They show that optimum stacking line was found to design a threedimensional blade for increasing the efciency. Kim and Seo [14] performed the blade shape optimization of a centrifugal fan having forward-curved blades, with RSM using three-dimensional Navier Stokes analysis. They showed that fan efciency is successfully improved by optimizing four design variables of the fan. In the present study, the RSM combined with a three-dimensional Navier Stokes solver is introduced to optimize the shape of a stator blade in a single-stage transonic axial compressor. A stacking line of the stator blade having positive or negative skewed value is selected as a variable of the blade optimization. The computed oweld inside the blade passage and the performance at the optimum condition are discussed. 2 TEST AXIAL COMPRESSOR

Fig. 1

Meridional view compressor

of

single-stage

axial

17-bladed rotor, followed by a stator with 26 blades. The relative Mach number at the rotor tip is 1.177 and the stage pressure ratio is 1.506. The rotor tip clearance is 0.4 mm and the maximum diameter of the rotor tip is 176 mm. The measured choking mass owrate is 3.235 kg/s, which corresponds to 106.4 per cent of the design owrate. The meridional view of the single-stage axial compressor is shown in Fig. 1. The compressor has a total axial length of 137.5 mm. Total pressure, total temperature, and adiabatic efciency with relation to mass owrates [15] are measured at the inlet and outlet (137.5 mm from the inlet) positions as shown in Fig. 1. The inlet position is located at 80.0 mm upstream of the hub leading edge of the rotor. 3 METHODS OF OPTIMIZATION AND NUMERICAL ANALYSIS RSM for optimization

3.1

A single-stage transonic axial compressor, which is the rst stage of a two-stage axial transonic compressor designed for a helicopter gas turbine engine [15], is considered to optimize the blade shape of the stator. The detailed specications of the compressor are summarized in Table 1. The stage consists of a
Table 1 Design specications of axial compressor
Flowrate Rotational speed Pressure ratio Rotor tip speed Adiabatic efciency Number of rotor blades Number of stator blades 3.04 kg/s 41 500 r/min 1.506 382 m/s 0.863 17 26

Optimization using RSM is a series of statistical and mathematical processes: generation of data by numerical computations or experiments, construction of response surface by interpolating the data, and optimization of the objective function on the surface. The overall procedures of the RSMbased optimization are shown in Fig. 2. First, an objective function is selected as a primary parameter for the shape optimization. Design variables are determined for maximizing the value of an objective function, and then experimental points are selected with the help of design of experiments (DOE). Next, the value of objective function at each experimental point is obtained by numerical analysis and experiments. Finally, a response surface is determined to obtain an optimal point. Although RSM was devised to obtain empirical correlation from the experimental data, the ability to reduce
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3.2

Objective function and design variables

Adiabatic efciency had is selected as an objective function of the axial compressor and is dened as follows

had

(P0exit =P0inlet )(g1)=g 1 T0exit =T0inlet 1

(2)

Fig. 2

Optimization procedure using RSM

the number of experiments allows this method to be applied widely to the optimization problems [16]. The polynomial-based response surfaces are commonly employed in RSM. In the present study, a response model f is assumed as a second-order polynomial, which can be written as follows:

where P0 and T0 are total pressure and total temperature, respectively. To enhance the adiabatic efciency of the compressor rotor, a stacking line of the stator blade is introduced as a variable for optimizing the blade shape. Fischer et al. [7] reported that the ow separation can be reduced in the bowed stator, which results in the increase of stagnation pressure ratio and efciency. The stacking line is dened by two shape variables, a skew angle at the mid-span section, d1, and a skew angle at the tip, d2, of the stator blade, as shown in Fig. 3. Both negative stacking line bended on the blade suction side and positive stacking line bended on the blade pressure side are tested to analyse the effect on the efciency of the compressor. The stacking line and related design variables are shown in Fig. 3. The ranges of skew angles for selection of the points for response evaluation are summarized in Table 2.

3.3

Numerical analysis method

f b0

n X j1

b j xj

n X j1

b jj xj2

XX bij xi xj
i=j

(1)

where n is the number of design variables, and x and b indicate the design variables and the coefcients, respectively. The number of coefcients (b0, b1, and so on) is (n 1).(n 2)/2. Unknown coefcients of polynomial are obtained from a standard least-squares regression. In this case, the number of data must be larger than the number of coefcients. In order to reduce the number of data needed for constructing a response surface and to improve the representation of the design space, the DOE is important for selecting design points. Among the different types of DOE techniques, D-optimal design [17] is employed in the present work for the representation of design space. With the number of design points only 1.5 2.5 times the number of coefcients in the response model, reliable results can be obtained.
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The three-dimensional thin-layer Navier Stokes and energy equations are solved on body-tted grids using an explicit nite-difference scheme. An explicit Runge Kutta scheme proposed by Jameson et al. [18] is used to solve ow from initial state to steady state with a spatially varying time step to accelerate convergence. Articial dissipation terms have been added to resolve shocks. The algebraic turbulence model of Baldwin and Lomax [19] has been employed to estimate the eddy viscosity.

Fig. 3

Positive stacking line

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Table 2 Design space of stacking line (positive/negative)

Variables Lower bound 0.03/20.03 0.1/20.1 Middle 0.08/20.08 0.16/20.16 Upper bound 0.13/20.13 0.22/20.22

d1 d2

Figure 4 shows the typical computational grids. A composite grid system with structured H-, C-, and O-type grids is adopted to present the complicated conguration of the axial compressor. H-type grids for the inlet ow region and O-type grids for the tip clearance region consist of 50 63 32 (in streamwise, spanwise, and pitchwise directions) and 166 12 12 grids, respectively. C-type grids for the rotor and the stator consist of 180 63 38 and 120 63 41 grids, respectively. The whole grid system has approximately 860 000 grid points. Grids are overlapped by one cell at the interface between two adjacent grid blocks because of the node-centred nite-difference scheme used in the solver. At the interface, the solutions next to the boundary are integrated circumferentially at each spanwise location and then they are stored for use as boundary conditions for the neighbouring grids. Mach number, total pressure, and total temperature are given at the inlet. At exit, the hub static pressure has been specied, and the radial equilibrium equation is solved along the blade span. In

the present calculation, all inlet and outlet boundary values are normalized by reference values. No-slip and adiabatic wall conditions are used. For reducing a computational load, a ow eld in a single blade passage is simulated by applying a periodic boundary condition in the tangential direction. Mixing (averaging)-plane method is introduced to solve the blade row between the rotor and the stator, exchanging spanwise distributions of averaged ow quantities at a common grid interface.

4 4.1

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Optimization of the stator blade in the axial compressor

The stator blade optimization in a single-stage transonic axial compressor is performed using RSM and numerical analysis. For the validation of the present numerical solution, the adiabatic efciency and the pressure ratio at the design and off-design conditions are compared with the experimental results, as shown in Fig. 5. The dashed thick line in Fig. 5 represents the position of the design owrate. In the gure, the mass ow is normalized with the chocking owrate (3.235 kg/s) obtained from the experimental measurement [15]. At the design owrate (mass ow/choke owrate 0.94 in Fig. 5), the chocking owrate obtained is 1 per cent higher than the experimental result. It is shown that the adiabatic efciency and the pressure ratio obtained from the numerical simulation have a maximum of 5 per cent error when compared with those from experiments near the design owrate. To construct a response surface for the present design space of the stacking line having two variables as shown in Table 2, nine training points are necessary for full factorial design. In the present study, however, seven training points are selected by Doptimal design. Each design variable is normalized so that the variable has the value of 21, 0, and 1 for lower, midpoint, and upper bound, respectively. To measure uncertainty in the set of coefcients in a polynomial, ANOVA and regression analysis provided by t-statistic [10] are used and the results are shown in Table 3. In Table 3, the coefcient of multiple determination R 2 measures the proportion of the variation in the response around the mean that can be attributed to terms in the model rather than to random error. The coefcient R 2 is dened as R2 SSR SSE 1 Syy Syy (3)

Fig. 4

Computational grids

where SSR is the regression sum of squares, Syy the total sum of squares, and SSE the error sum of
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Table 3 Results of ANOVA and regression analysis for the positive stacking line
Model 1 R 0.998 R2 adjusted 0.98 S. E. of the estimate 0.00114

line. Optimum design variables obtained are as follows: d1 0.13 and d2 0.19. Table 4 shows the result of optimization at the design owrate. Adiabatic efciency of the compressor, which is the objective of this optimization, is successfully increased by 2.5 per cent. It is noted that the positive stacking line of the stator blade is effective in increasing the adiabatic efciency of the single-stage transonic axial compressor. The increase in efciency is mainly caused by the pressure enhancement. Figure 6 shows the distributions of adiabatic efciency for the reference stator blade with straight stacking line and the optimized stator blades, which are shown in the same manner as in Fig. 5. It can be found that the increase in efciency is mainly observed between 93 and 99 per cent of the chocking owrate, whereas there is no change in efciency beyond the chocking owrate. From the optimization of the stacking line of the stator blade, it should be noted that the stacking line of the stator blade affects the general performance of the compressor strongly. Distributions of total pressure, total temperature, and the adiabatic efciency for the reference and optimized shapes, which are tangentially averaged values at the exit of stator, are shown along the spanwise direction (Figs 7 9). The increase in total temperature is nearly uniform in the central region, whereas the maximum increase is located near 90 per cent span. It is noted that the improvement of adiabatic efciency dened by total temperature and total pressure occurs in the region beyond 40 per cent span, as shown in Fig. 9.

4.2
Fig. 5 Comparison of performance curves between calculation and experiment

Flow characteristics with reference and optimized stator blades

squares. Guinta [20] suggested that the typical values of adjusted R 2 are in the range, 0.9 4 adjusted R 2 4 1.0, whereas the observed response values are accurately predicted by the RSM model. In this respect, the present response surface is reliable as shown in Table 3. Throughout the optimization using positive and negative stacking lines, the maximum adiabatic efciency is observed in the case of the positive stacking
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The characteristics of the internal ow through the rotor and stator are analysed to understand the effects on the efciency of the blade. Figure 10
Table 4 Results of optimization
Initial shape Total pressure P0/P0 ref Total temperature T0/T0 ref Adiabatic efciency (%) 1.544 1.150 88.0 Optimized shape 1.585 1.156 90.2 Increment (%) 2.7 0.5 2.5

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Fig. 6

Comparison of adiabatic efciency curves between calculation and experiment

Fig. 8

Total temperature

shows Mach number contours on the plane of 90 per cent span for the reference and the optimized stator blades, which are perspective view from the casing. The 90 per cent span is the position where a relatively large increase in total temperature and pressure are observed as shown in Figs 7 and 8. In the gures, the dashed thick line indicates the position of the mixing plane. The inow is accelerated to supersonic state near the inlet of the blade passage i.e. a bow shock is generated upstream of the leading edge of

the rotor, and a passage shock develops at the rotor suction surface. Near the fore part of the stator suction surface, Mach number of the optimal stator is lower than the conventional one. Figure 11 shows relative pressure contours on the plane of 90 per cent span for the reference and the optimized stator blades, which are shown in the same manner as in Fig. 10. Low pressure is observed at upstream of the passage shock where high Mach number is distributed as shown in Fig. 10. Pressure recovery is observed along the blade passage in

Fig. 7

Total pressure

Fig. 9

Adiabatic efciency

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Fig. 10

Mach number contours on the plane of 90 per cent span (interval of contour lines 0.06)

Fig. 11

Relative pressure contours on the plane of 90 per cent span (interval of contour lines 0.375)

both the cases. Relatively high pressure near the fore part of the stator suction surface corresponds to the lower Mach number of the optimal stator. Figure 12 shows the limiting streamlines on the rotor suction surface. In the fore part of the blade passage, separation line is formed because of
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interference between the shock and the suction surface. An attachment line is observed behind the separation line, which gives rise to separation bubble region between the separation and the attachment lines. It is noted that a strong radial
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Fig. 12

Limiting streamlines on the suction surface of a rotor

Fig. 14

Limiting streamlines on the pressure and suction surfaces of a stator (optimum)

ow follows the attachment line, and the ow pattern on the suction surface of the rotor for both cases is almost same. Figures 13 and 14 show the limiting streamlines on the blade surface of the stator for the reference and the optimized cases. On the stator pressure surface, no separation and attachment lines are observed in both the cases. However, an attachment line generates near the leading edge of the blade suction surface for both the stators. The separation line observed near the trailing edge of the suction surface for the reference stator is removed by optimizing the stator blade with the optimal positive stacking

line. It is well known that the separation on the blade suction surface deteriorates the performance of the turbomachinery. It should be noted that the increase in pressure for the optimized stator blade is caused owing to suppression of the separation line on the suction surface of the stator.

CONCLUSION

The shape optimization of a stator blade in a singlestage transonic axial compressor was performed by RSM and three-dimensional Navier Stokes analysis. By optimizing the stacking line of the stator blade, the adiabatic efciency is increased by 2.5 per cent when compared with that of the reference shape of the stator with straight staking line. The increase in efciency is due to the pressure enhancement through the stator, which is mainly caused by suppressing the separation on the suction surface of the stator.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported by grant No. 2001-00000366 from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. The authors also acknowledge the support from KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) under The Sixth Strategic Supercomputing Support Program. The use of the computing system of the Supercomputing Center is greatly appreciated.
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Fig. 13

Limiting streamlines on the pressure and suction surfaces of a stator (reference)

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11 Shyy, W., Papila, N., Vaidyanathan, R., and Tucker, K. Global design optimization for aerodynamics and rocket propulsion components. Progr. Aerosp. Sci., 2001, 37, 59 118. 12 Sevant, N. E., Bloor, M. I. G., and Wilson, M. J. Aerodynamic design of a ying wing using response surface methodology. J. Aircraft, 2000, 37, 562 569. 13 Ahn, C. S. and Kim, K. Y. Aerodynamic design optimization of a compressor rotor with Navier Stokes analysis. Proc. Instn Mech. Engrs, Part A J. Power and Energy, 2003, 217(2), 179 184. 14 Kim, K. Y. and Seo, S. J. Shape optimization of forward-curved blades centrifugal fan with Navier Stokes analysis. ASME J. Fluids Eng., 2004, 126(5), 735742. 15 Kim, C. T., Kim, J. H., and Lee, D. S. Performance test of a two stage axial compressor of a turboshaft engine for helicopter. In Proceedings of the KSAS Spring Conference, Korea Aerospace Research Institute, 1999, 327 331. 16 Myers, R. H. Response surface methodology current status and future direction. J. Qual. Technol., 1999, 31(1), 30 44. 17 Box, M. J. and Draper, N. R. Fractional designs, the jX TXj criterion, and some related matters. Technometrics, 1971, 13(4), 731 742. 18 Jameson, A., Schmidt, W., and Turkel, E. Numerical solutions of the Euler equation by nite volume methods using Runge Kutta time stepping schemes, AIAA paper No. 81 1259, 1981. 19 Baldwin, B. S. and Lomax, H. Thin layer approximation and algebraic model for separated turbulent ow, AIAA paper No. 78 257, 1978. 20 Guinta, A. A. Aircraft multidisciplinary design optimization using design of experimental theory and response surface modeling methods. Ph.D Thesis Department of Aerospace Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, 1997.

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