Analysis of Flow Characteristic of Transonic Tandem Rotor Airfoil and Its Optimization

Abstract

Tandem blade technology has become an effective method to break the load limit of conventional aerodynamic configurations. To expand the application range of tandem blades, the supersonic tandem blade flow characteristic was studied and an optimal design was conducted by using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, with an inflow Mach number of 1.2. The main conclusions follow: (1) the tandem blade loss is difficult to control because of the complicated flow structures with supersonic inflow; (2) the forward blade loss dominates the tandem blade overall loss in the whole operating conditions; and (3) the tandem blade profile was optimized by considering the aerodynamic interaction between forward and aft blade. The numerical simulation results show that the total pressure loss declines by 20% at the design point, and the incidence range increases by about 0.5°.

Keywords

• tandem blade
• supersonic inflow
• prescribed velocity distribution airfoil
• shock wave control
• numerical simulation