Numerical simulation of compressor solid particle erosion with dynamic meshes
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2026
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The operation of aircraft engines in particle laden environments causes deterioration of the engine components. A significant source of reduced component efficiency and increased engine fuel consumption is solid particle erosion of the compressor. It alters the shape of the compressor blades and influences their aerodynamic performance. The erosion process is a time-dependent and non-linear process that is driven by the interaction between the fluid flow, the particle trajectories, and the resulting impacts on the compressor blades and vanes. In current simulations the erosion damage is accumulated linearly, and erosion patterns are analyzed. The interaction between flow field and geometry deterioration are investigated on generic the specimen with simplified geometries. The time dependent blade shape change and the corresponding flow field adjustment have not been considered simultaneously in compressor blade simulations. Multiphase simulations of solid particle erosion with mesh morphing provide an insight into the non-linear and time-dependent compressor blade erosion process. In this work, a numerical method to couple the erosion simulation with mesh morphing is presented. This coupling is achieved by a transformation of the material loss of the particle simulation into a displacement field for each node of the computational mesh. The morphing process potentially causes grid crossovers and negative cell volumes during particular time steps at particular regions. In such cases, the mesh quality is repaired in regions with a reduced quality through a local node adjustment. This is referred to as a novel smoothing approach. This effectively prevents grid crossovers and achieves numerical stability. The numerically determined shape change of two-dimensional NASA Rotor 37 compressor blades is validated against measured data from an erosion experiment in a linear compressor cascade. This demonstrates the capability of the new method to perform precise numerical simulations of compressor solid particle erosion.
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