Shock/Boundary-Layer/Tip-Clearance Interaction in a Transonic Rotor Blade

A newly designed rotor was modeled from the well-known radially stacked NASA rotor 37 by applying a three-dimensional shape to the original blade stacking line. A considerable curvature toward the direction of rotor rotation was given to the new blade. A three-dimensional numerical model, developed and validated using a commercial computational fluid dynamics Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes code, was adopted to predict the flowfield inside the new rotor. Steady-viscous-flow calculations were run at the design speed of the baseline configuration. Compared with rotor 37, the new rotor showed a higher efficiency, mainly due to a three-dimensional modification of the shock structure. At the outer span, the new rotor developed a blade-to-blade shock front located more downstream than in the baseline rotor, with a considerable impact on the flowfield near the casing. Computational fluid dynamics How visualizations showed a less detrimental shock/boundary-layer/tip-clearance interaction at low-flow operating conditions, with a considerable reduction of the low-momentum-fluid region after the shock.