Abstract
Combustor pre-diffuser is an important element connecting the compressor and combustor. The design of pre-diffuser should be in such a way that the flow velocity to be within allowable limit to hold the flame in the combustor and also it should recover pressure with less amount of total pressure loss. The general practice is to design the compressor and combustor separately for their performance. However, integrated design of outlet guide vanes and pre-diffuser is given importance, on nowadays, to improve the overall performance. Basically, the outlet guide vane blades are modified to improve the performance. In the present work, numerical simulations studies have been carried out for a well-known high speed compressor, NASA Stage 37, to identify the influence of blade parameters. The computational domain consists of compressor rotor, stator and combustor pre-diffuser. The stator blades serve as outlet guide vanes. In literature, studies were shown that there is improvement in introducing blade sweep. Also, blade lean was shown some advantages for the case of a pre-diffuser with axial inlet and radial outlet with flow turning. However, in the present case of axial inlet and axial outlet, blade lean has not shown improvement in the performance. A diffuser showing slightly unstable condition in the conventional design, Area Ratio (AR) of 1.5 in the present case, has shown improvement with the presence of blade sweep.
