This paper deals with the design of an optimised compressor blade and the experimental verification of its performance at design and off-design operation.

Starting from an existing controlled-diffusion blade, a new two-dimensional blade section has been designed by means of an inverse method, maintaining the same flow turning. Optimisation is made to achieve lower losses over an incidence range of 10 degrees while care has been taken to keep the blade thickness within prescribed tolerances.

The blade has been manufactured and tested in the C1 low speed cascade tunnel of the von Karman Institute. Experiments confirm substantial performance improvements at the blade mid section over the whole range of incidences. Measurements near the side walls show that the secondary flow losses are unchanged.

Verifications with a Navier-Stokes solver show a remarkable agreement with measurements and flow visualisations and explain the reasons for the important performance improvement at high incidence.

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