Significant effort in the current technological development of aircraft is aimed at improving engine efficiency, while reducing fuel burn, emissions, and noise levels. One way to achieve these is to better integrate airframe and propulsion system. Tighter integration, however, may also cause adverse effects to the flow entering the engines, such as total pressure, total temperature, and swirl distortions. Swirl distortions are angular non-uniformities in the flow that may alter the functioning of specific components of the turbomachinery systems. To investigate the physics involved in the ingestion of swirl, pre-determined swirl distortion profiles were generated through the StreamVane method in a low-speed wind tunnel and in a full-scale turbofan research engine. Stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to collect three-component velocity fields at discrete planes downstream of the generation of the distortions with two main objectives in mind: identifying the physics behind the axial development of the distorted flow; and describing the generation of the distortion by the StreamVane and its impact to the flow as a distortion generating device.
Analyses of the mean velocity, velocity gradients, and Reynolds stress tensor components in these flows provided significant insight into the driving physics. Comparisons between small-scale and full-scale results showed that swirl distortions are Mach number independent in the subsonic regime. Reynolds number independence was also verified for the studied cases. The mean secondary flow and flow angle profiles demonstrated that the axial development of swirl distortions is highly driven by two-dimensional vortex dynamics, when the flow is isolated from fan effects. As the engine fan is approached, the vortices are axially stretched and stabilized by the acceleration of the flow. The flow is highly turbulent immediately downstream of the StreamVane due to the presence of the device, but that vane-induced turbulence mixes with axial distance, so that the device effects are attenuated for distances greater than a diameter downstream, which is further confirmed by the turbulent length scales of the flow. These results provide valuable insight into the generation and development of swirl distortion for ground-testing environments, and establishes PIV as a robust tool for engine inlet investigations. / Ph. D. / In order to improve performance of the next generation of aircraft, engineers are developing research that aims at reducing fuel consumption, improving the efficiency of engines, and also decreasing the levels of produced noise. There are several ways to achieve these goals, but significant effort has been focused on modifying the position of the engines on the aircraft to improve the properties of the airflow entering them. Computational simulations and small-scale tests have shown that this approach can be beneficial, while also showing that adverse effects to the properties of the air can be caused, affecting the behavior of the propulsion system. This current work makes use of a technique called StreamVane™ to reproduce those modified airflows in laboratory testing environments in order to understand how that flow might behave in the inlet of an engine, and what effects it could cause. This helps scientists and engineers decide if those modifications to the engine would be worth the time and money investments to the aircraft even before a full-scale model of the aircraft is built. More specifically, this work is an experimental investigation of two different types of distortions to the inlet airflow that could be caused by the aforementioned novel aircraft configurations, or by existing ones that have not been fully described yet.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/82921 |
| Date | 25 April 2018 |
| Creators | Guimaraes Bucalo, Tamara |
| Contributors | Mechanical Engineering, Lowe, K. Todd, Borgoltz, Aurelien, O'Brien, Walter F. Jr., Dancey, Clinton L., Ng, Wing Fai |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/x-zip-compressed |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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