A Study on the Flow and Power Characteristics of Rotor in the APU

Recently, Use of Auxiliary power unit(APU) is increasing by growing demand for improvement of insufficient electric power and installation of emergency generation devices in military tracked vehicles and civil markets. And the trend is that the units are demanded for smaller size, lighter weight and higher output power, etc to suit consumer demands. To achieve these, it is essential to develop high performance system. Therefore, in this study, it was conducted in numerical analysis to investigate flow characteristics of rotor in APU generator. Also output performance of APU applied on the rotor is analyzed by experimental method. As the result, higher rotating speed of rotor caused high air flow rate at suction and it leads to linear increase of discharging flow rate. The maximum theoretical power was achieved at 12 /min of flow rate and, at that time, output power of generator was about 7.825 kW. Also, it can be confirmed the stabilization of output performance is achieved in about 2 seconds by experiment.