Unsteady Body Force Methodology for Fan Operability Assessment under Clean and Distorted Inflow Conditions

Abstract

With more complex aircraft architectures, fast and cost-effective design iterations are key to improve overall fuel efficiency. This paper proposes to revisit a low-order unsteady modeling approach to replace costly full annulus URANS simulation. Unsteady Body Force Methods (UBFM) could allow a significant cost reduction for fan distortion ingestion and operability assessment. In this approach, the bladed area in the computational domain is replaced by source terms in the Navier–Stokes equations, and the cost of the simulation is reduced by a factor of 26. The operability of the fan is evaluated with and without distortion in order to assess the accuracy of the model. Previously published results of URANS simulations performed on the same fan subject to an unsteady vortex ingestion are used as reference.1 The results show that our UBFM is able to predict rotating stall cells, with patterns and rotating speed similar to the URANS data.