A Study of a Centrifugal Compressor Using Mixing Plane Implementations

A study has been conducted to evaluate a mixing plane implementation on a centrifugal compressor with 4:1 compression ratio. The compressor performance and flow field are modeled using a steady state CFD solver at three different operating points. The importance of the mixing plane location in the solution process is discussed. A new initialization method to speed-up the convergence significantly is described and utilized in the study. The compressor performance calculated by the CFD code compares well with the values from laser anemometry and pneumatic probes measurements. The flow structure inside the compressor is illustrated by comparing the results from the experiments to those from the computation. Good agreement on the detailed flow structure is obtained between the CFD and the experimental values. The computational mesh and the location of the mixing plane are discussed.Copyright © 2007 by Ansys, Inc.