Advanced research is currently being conducted at Snecma to design a swept wide chord fan blade with a very high specific flow value of 230 kg/s/m2 at the aero design point instead of 212 kg/s/m2 on current turbofan engines.
This concept has the potential benefit of higher thrust than conventional engines for a given value of the fan diameter. This induces potential advantages in terms of performance (reduced nacelle drag) and installation under the wings.
These advantages are subject to the condition that we retain high fan bypass efficiency with axial Mach number close to 0.8. The intensive use of 3D Euler and 3D Navier-Stokes blade to blade computations in the aero design makes it possible to overcome this difficulty.
This paper describes the aero optimization of a swept fan blade with a specific flow of 230 kg/s/m2, a corrected tip speed of 350 m/s and a bypass pressure ratio of 1.45. Applications of the most recent numerical methods are presented, including 3D Navier-Stokes blade to blade computations.
