Performance Improvement of a Centrifugal Compressor for the Fuel Cell Vehicle by Tip Leakage Vortex Control

Heightened interests have been laid at the preliminary design and optimization of the centrifugal compressor for the fuel cell vehicle. The centrifugal compressor for fuel cell vehicle is driven by a high-speed motor; however, the limit of the motor speed makes the flow passage of the impeller long and narrow, which leads to a serious tip leakage loss. Serious tip leakage loss deteriorates the compressor performance. In this paper, 3-D numerical simulations were carried out with the aim of investigating the tip leakage loss in a prototype centrifugal compressor for a 100 kW fuel cell stack. The results revealed that the mixing loss caused by the interaction between the tip leakage vortex and the downstream tip leakage flow contributed to the major part of the tip leakage loss. The path of the tip leakage vortex almost followed the streamwise direction, while the downstream tip leakage flow exhibited strong circumferential momentum, which referred to the fact that they were nearly orthogonal. Therefore, a flow control approach, which was realized by enhancing the blade loading around the leading edge of blade tips in this paper, was proposed to decrease the interaction angle between the tip leakage vortex and the downstream tip leakage flow and then mitigate mixing loss by changing the flow direction of the tip leakage vortex. The results showed a smaller interaction angle was achieved in the optimized impeller compared with the baseline one. Meanwhile, the efficiency was also improved by 1.30% at design condition and the maximum efficiency improvement could be up to 10% at large mass flow condition of 92 000 r/min. Being manufactured and tested, the optimized compressor was proved to achieve an isentropic efficiency of 75.84% at design condition.