Impact of manufacturing variability and non-axisymmetry on high-pressure compressor stage performance

This paper introduces an approach for considering manufacturing variability leading to a non-axisymmetric blading in CFD simulation of a high-pressure compressor stage. A set of 150 rotor blades from a high-pressure compressor stage was 3D scanned to obtain the manufacturing variability. The obtained point clouds were parameterized using a parametric blade model, which uses typical profile parameters for translating the geometric variability into a numerical model. Probabilistic simulation methods allow for generation of a sampled set of blades that statistically corresponds to the measured one. This technique was applied to generate 4000 sampled blades to investigate the influence of a non-axisymmetric blading. It was found that the aerodynamic performance is considerably influenced by a variation of passage cross section. Nevertheless, this influence decreases with an increasing number of independently sampled blades and thus independently shaped passage cross sections. Due to a more accurate consideration of the geometric variability, the presented methodology allows for a more realistic performance analysis of an HPC stage.