Numerical and experimental study of bleed impact in multistage axial compressors

In this study, the influence of inter-stage bleeding on the compressor performance and inter-stage flow field of a multistage axial compressor is investigated by both experimental and numerical methods. The experiment is conducted on a four-stage low-speed axial compressor, and a specific computational model is built to simulate the experiment environment accurately. To illuminate the fluid mechanisms of bleeding effect in detail, both the experiment and the simulation are carried out twice, i.e., in the first time, the mass flow rate upstream the bleed location is constant under different bleed rate conditions; while in the second time, the mass flow rate downstream the bleed location is constant under different bleed rate conditions. The results demonstrate that inter-stage bleeding has little influence on upstream compressor characteristics, and affects the upstream flow field only in the rear half of the stator. The bleed effect on the downstream flow field is embodied in the variation of an incoming flow profile, an increase as the compressor inlet flow coefficient decreases. Therefore, such an effect is only significant on compressor characteristics at small flow coefficient conditions. In multistage compressors, the variation of compressor characteristics and flow field caused by inter-stage bleeding is the comprehensive result of the bleeding and the variation of the upstream working condition. In addition, the comparison between numerical and experimental results shows that the flow moves towards top half of span through the downstream rotor passage in the numerical simulation, whereas the trend of flow field variation with different bleed rates at the outlet of the downstream rotor and stator is the same with that at the inlet of the downstream rotor in the experiment, which means that the numerical method has overestimated the radial mixing intensity of the flow.