Experimental and computational investigation of a centrifugal compressor stage

This paper presents experimental and computational investigations on a centrifugal compressor stage to study unsteady interaction flow and to verify the capability of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. Detailed instantaneous flow has been measured at several different measuring positions using a hot-wire anemometer with the phase-locked ensemble-averaged technique. To describe quantitatively the unsteady effect induced from the impeller, an unsteady intensity is defined in this paper. Also, two computational investigations for the tested centrifugal compressor are performed and compared with corresponding experimental data: One is a steady method with the deterministic stress model and the other is an unsteady method with the sliding interface technique.