Impact of Manufacturing Variability and Nonaxisymmetry on High-Pressure Compressor Stage Performance

This paper introduces an approach for considering manufacturing variability leading to a nonaxisymmetric blading in the computational fluid dynamics simulation of a high-pressure compressor stage. A set of 150 rotor blades from a high-pressure compressor stage was 3D scanned in order to obtain the manufacturing variability. The obtained point clouds were parameterized using a parametric blade model, which uses typical profile parameters to translate the geometric variability into a numerical model. Probabilistic simulation methods allow for the generation of a sampled set of blades that statistically corresponds to the measured one. This technique was applied to generate 4000 sampled blades in order to investigate the influence of a nonaxisymmetric blading. It was found that the aerodynamic performance is considerably influenced by a variation of the passage cross section. Nevertheless, this influence decreases with an increasing number of independently sampled blades and, thus, independently shaped passage cross sections. Due to its more accurate consideration of the geometric variability, the presented methodology allows for a more realistic performance analysis of a high-pressure compressor stage.