Experimental Investigation of the Blade End Slots on Controlling the Corner Separation in a Highly Loaded Compressor Cascade

To achieve the development of the modern highly loaded compressors, further improvements have done on the design philosophy of the blade end slots based on the intention of reorganizing the blade end flow via blade end slots that proposed by our team previously. Experimental investigations are conducted on controlling the corner separation flow for a highly loaded high-speed compressor cascade (with diffusion factor of 0.55). Firstly, a double slots scheme originated from the endwall to 20% span height is obtained through numerical optimization. The optimized slotting scheme is based on our control regime. Then, experimental measurements are conducted to evaluate the control effect of the blade end slots under different incoming flow incidence angles at the Mach number of 0.59. Results show that the blade end slots can effectively reorganize the blade end flow, suppress the occurrence of the open corner separation under high loading operating conditions, and improve the aerodynamic performance of the blade over a wide range of incidence angles, thus, the loading limits of the blade is improved. The jet flow from the slot outlet is self-adaptive, thus, the effective operating range for the blade is extensively broadened.