Assessment of Transition Modeling for the Design of Controlled Diffusion Airfoil Compressor Cascades

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether correlation-based transition models can be used for the design of CDA profiles. To this end, a CDA compressor cascade has been widely experimentally investigated at DLR Cologne. Off-design measurements have been carried out and the influence of the variation of four flow parameters has been investigated: The inlet Mach number, the incidence, the chord-based Reynolds number and the free-stream turbulence intensity. The inlet Mach number has been varied from 0.5 up to 0.8. The incidence was varied over the whole working range and beyond. Realistic values of the Reynolds number and of the free-stream turbulence intensity have been attained. Hence, the test case apt to assess the capacity of the DLR’s in-house turbomachinery specific CFD code TRACE to design modern compressor blades. In this paper, computations simulating the influence of those four parameters on the performance of the CDA profile are presented and compared to the measurements. Two transition models are used for this study: an in-house model denoted MultiMode model and the γ-ReΘ model. In addition, two turbulence models (Wilcox k-ω and Menter k-ω SST) and their turbomachinery extensions have also been used for this study. The results between the different numerical simulations and the measurements are discussed in term of loss coefficients and Mach number distributions. The computed losses are close to the experimental values and the physics of the flow is also well reproduced. Bypass transition as well as laminar separation bubbles have been simulated in accordance with the experimental observations. Hence, the TRACE code is able to predict the onset of transition over a wide range of flow conditions.© 2013 ASME