1999 Turbomachinery Committee Best Paper Award - Development of advanced compressor airfoils for heavy-duty gas turbines - Part I: Design and optimization

A new family of subsonic compressor airfoils, which are characterized by lo w losses and wide operating ranges, has been designed for use in heavy-duty gas turbines. In particular the influence of the higher airfoil Reynolds n umbers compared to aeroengine compressors and the impact of these differenc es on the location of transition ar taken into account. The design process itself is carried out by the combination of a geometric code for the airfoi l description, with a blade-to-blade solver and a numerical optimization al gorithm. The optimization process includes the design-point losses for a sp ecified Q3D flow problem and the off-design performance for the entire oper ating range. The family covers a wide range of inlet flow angle, Mach numbe r, flow turning, blade thickness, solidity and AVDR in order to consider th e entire range of flow conditions that occur in practical compressor design . The superior performance of the new airfoil family is demonstrated by a c omparison with conventional controlled diffusion airfoils (CDA). The advant age in performance has ben confirmed by detailed experimental investigation s, which will be presented in Part II of the paper. This leads to the concl usion that CDA airfoils that have been primarily developed for aeroengine a pplication are not the optimum solution, if directly transferred to heavy-d uty gas turbines. A significant improvement in compressor efficiency is pos sible, if the new profiles are used instead of conventional airfoils. [S099 8-504X(00)02102-4].