Centrifugal Compressor of a 100 kW Microturbine: Part 2 — Numerical Study of Impeller-Diffuser Interaction

The interaction between impeller and diffuser blades in high-speed centrifugal compressors is thought to have a significant influence on the flow within the diffuser. In this part, Computational Fluid Dynamics is exploited to simulate, visualize and analyze the complex flow generated by the interaction, with particular emphasis on the unsteady behavior of the vaned diffuser of the microturbine compressor studied in part 1. For this purpose, the 3D geometry of the compressor stage is studied by performing a fully unsteady simulation of rotor-stator interaction. The results of the unsteady calculation regarding the diffuser performance are then averaged in time and compared with those obtained with a fully steady and decoupled computation in order to highlight the main difference between the two approaches.